"And yet," he answered, "you understand these awful phenomena--their
causes. You remember our little talk about electricity--here it is! We
know all that is but the restoration of an equilibrium. Think what it
will be when God restores the moral balance, and settles the equities of
eternity! There are moods, times, and situations in which we contemplate
justly our tremendous Creator. Fear him who, after he has killed the
body, has power to cast into hell. Yea, I say unto you, fear him. Here
all suffering is transitory. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. This life is the season of time and of mercy; but
once in hell, mercy is no more, and eternity opens, and endures, and has
no end."
Here he ceased for a time to speak, and looked across the estuary,
listening, as it seemed, to the roll and tremble of the thunder. After a
little while, he said:
"That you are to die is most certain; nothing more uncertain than the
time and manner; by a slow or a sudden death; in a state of grace or
sin. Therefore, we are warned to be ready at all hours. Better twenty
years too soon than one moment late; for to perish once is to be lost
for ever. Your death depends upon your life; such as your life is, such
will be your death. How can we dare to live in a state that we dare not
die in?"
I sat gazing at this young priest, who, sentence after sentence, was
striking the very key-note of the awful thought that seemed to peal and
glare in the storm. He stood with his head uncovered, his great earnest
eyes sometimes raised, sometimes fixed on me, and the uncertain gusts at
fitful intervals tossed his hair this way and that. The light of the
setting sun touched his thin hand, and his head, and glimmered on the
long grass; the graves lay around us; and the voice of God himself
seemed to speak in the air.
Mr. Carmel drew nearer, and in the same earnest vein talked on. There
was no particle of which is termed the controversial in what he had
said. He had not spoken a word that I could not subscribe. He had
quoted, also, from our version of the Bible; but he presented the
terrors of revelation with a prominence more tremendous than I was
accustomed to, and the tone of his discourse was dismaying.
I will not attempt to recollect and to give you in detail the
conversation that followed. He presented, with a savage homeliness of
illustration, with the same simplicity and increasing force, the same
awful view of Christianity. Beyond the naked strength of the facts, and
the terrible brevity with which he stated them in their different
aspects, I don't know that there was any special eloquence in his
discourse, but in the language of Scripture, his words made "both my
ears tingle."
He did not attempt to combat my Protestant tenets directly; that might
have alarmed me; he had too much tact for that. Anything he said with
that tendency was in the way simply of a discourse of the teaching and
practice of his own Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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