In a
mechanical kind of way we go on doing what we had before been doing
in spirit and in truth. After Orpheus, when he had lost his ideal,
was torn to pieces by the Thracian women, his lyre still repeated
Eurydice's name.
The point to which the priests attached the highest importance was
moral conduct, and their own spotless lives entitled them to be severe
in this respect, while their sermons made such an impression upon
me that during the whole of my youth I never once forgot their
injunctions. These sermons were so awe-inspiring, and many of the
remarks which they contained are so engraved upon my memory, that I
cannot even now recall them without a sort of tremor. For instance,
the preacher once referred to the case of Jonathan, who died for
having eaten a little honey. "_Gustans gustavi paululum mellis, et
ecce morior_." I lost myself in wonderment as to what this small
quantity of honey could have been which was so fatal in its effects.
The preacher said nothing to explain this, but heightened the effect
of his mysterious allusion with the words--pronounced in a very hollow
and lugubrious tone--_tetigisse periisse_. At other times the text
would be the passage from Jeremiah, "_Mors ascendit per fenestras_"
This puzzled me still more, for what could be this death which came
up through the windows, these butterfly wings which the lightest touch
polluted? The preacher pronounced the words with knitted brow and
uplifted eyes. But what perplexed me most of all was a passage in the
life of some saintly person of the seventeenth century who compared
women to firearms which wound from afar.
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