THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
her forces towards death. She drags those who will not
walk.
A man whom one may call the great prophet of drunkards,
Edgar Poe, that sublime madman, that genius of lucid
extravagance, has depicted with terrifying reality the night-
mares of perversity. ...
“T killed the old man because he squinted.” “I did that
because I ought not to have done it.”
There is the terrible antistrophe of Tertullian’s Credo guia
absurdun..
To brave God and to insult Him, is a final act of faith.
“The dead praise thee not, O Lord,” said the Psalmist; and
we might add if we dared: ‘‘ The dead do not blaspheme thee.”
“O my son!” said a father as he leaned over the bed
of his child who had fallen into lethargy after a violent access
of delirium: “insult me again, beat me, bite me, I shall feel
that you are still alive, but do not rest for ever in the
frightful silence of the tomb!”
A great crime always comes to protest against great luke-
warmness. A hundred thousand good priests, had their
charity been more active, might have prevented the crime
of the wretch Verger. The Church has the right to judge,
condemn and punish an ecclesiastic who causes scandal; but
she has not the right to abandon him to the frenzies of
despair and the temptations of misery and hunger.
Nothing is so terrifying as nothingness, and if one could
ever formulate the conception of it, if it were possible to
admit it, Hell would be a thing to hope for.
This is why Nature itself seeks and imposes expiation as
a remedy; that is why chastisement is a chastening, as that
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