n days was full of life and the
gospel cites for our benefit certain facts which prove that the words
with which it resounded were not lost in the empty spaces. They moved
and struck home from the humblest regions of society to the exalted
spheres, to the royal throne itself. John garnered love and hate,
blessing and curse, the desirable fruits of all energetic action.
Since that time and before, more than one voice has been able,
applying them to itself, to give to those prophetic words, "voices in
the wilderness," another very melancholy significance. The supreme
image of despair is a voice that is lost in the silence, as is lost,
in the bosom of dead solitudes, the call that no one hears, for succor
that will never come.

After having spoken of the different voices, of their power, of their
effects, let us bestow a compassionate remembrance upon the lost
voices, on those who were or who are still, in the most lamentable
sense of that word, voices in the wilderness.--To be a man, a soul, to
have felt the lighting of a holy flame within oneself; to love truth
and justice; to feel the pain of contact with a life ruled over by
falsehood and violence; at the heart of this poignant contrast between
a divine ideal and a heart-rending reality, to receive from his
conscience, from God himself, the command to speak; to put his life
into this work, to renounce everything to be only a voice ... and
after all this to see himself forsaken, neglected, despised! To wear
oneself out slowly in a strife obscure and without issue; to perish
without having aroused either sympathy or opposition, to disappear
into oblivion before disappearing in the tomb ... ah! all the furies,
all the bloody reprisals, the dungeons, the gibbets, the massacres,
all the martyrdoms by which human wickedness strove to stifle the
voice of the just, are less horrible than this extermination by
apathy.

And yet, not to press things to this cruel extremity, but remembering
the parable of the sower, where so many seeds are lost for the few
that take root and flourish, ought we not be willing to be, in the
greatest number of cases, voices in the wilderness, only too happy if
our thankless labors are recompensed elsewhere by an encouraging echo?
Have we not here, on the contrary, the image of human life? we are
always aspiring toward an ideal more elevated than that which we
realize. We are always precursors, and it becomes us to accept humbly
what that destiny h