Previous - next
excited, and so enraged, that I should assuredly have taken my own
life, had not the voice of religion, and the recollection of my
parents restrained my hand. I lost the tranquillity of mind I had
acquired at Milan; during many days, I despaired of regaining it,
and I cannot even allude to this interval without feelings of
horror. It was vain to attempt it, I could not pray; I questioned
the justice of God; I cursed mankind, and all the world, revolving
in my mind all the possible sophisms and satires I could think of,
respecting the hollowness and vanity of virtue. The disappointed
and the exasperated are always ingenious in finding accusations
against their fellow-creatures, and even the Creator himself. Anger
is of a more universal and injurious tendency than is generally
supposed. As we cannot rage and storm from morning till night, and
as the most ferocious animal has necessarily its intervals of
repose, these intervals in man are greatly influenced by the immoral
character of the conduct which may have preceded them. He appears
to be at peace, indeed, but it is an irreligious, malignant peace; a
savage sardonic smile, destitute of all charity or dignity; a love
of confusion, intoxication, and sarcasm.
In this state I was accustomed to sing--anything but hymns--with a
kind of mad, ferocious joy. I spoke to all who approached my
dungeon, jeering and bitter things; and I tried to look upon the
whole creation through the medium of that commonplace wisdom, the
wisdom of the cynics. This degrading period, on which I hate to
reflect, lasted happily only for six or seven days, during which my
Bible had become covered with dust. One of the jailer's boys,
thinking to please me, as he cast his eye upon it, observed, "Since
you left off reading that great, ugly book, you don't seem half so
melancholy, sir." "Do you think so?" said I. Taking the Bible in
my hands, I wiped off the dust, and opening it hastily, my eyes fell
upon the following words: --"And he said unto his disciples, it must
needs be that offences come; but woe unto him by whom they come; for
better had it been for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of
these little ones."
I was affected upon reading this passage, and I felt ashamed when I
thought that this little boy had perceived, from the dust with which
it was covered, that I no longer read my Bible, and had even
supposed that I had acquired a better temper by want of attention to
my religious duties, and become less wretched by forgetting my God.
"You little graceless fellow," I exclaimed, though reproaching him
in a gentle tone, and grieved at having afforded him a subject of
scandal; "this is not a great, ugly book, and for the few days that
I have left off reading it, I find myself much worse. If your
mother would let you stay with me a little while, you would see that
Previous - next
