ery creature of
God, then, that the soul encounters must be tested by this rule, How far
does the use of it serve for the final end? For it must be used so far,
and no farther. Here then was a diagram of the Exercises, given in
miniature at the beginning.

Then the great facts that practically all men acknowledge, and upon which
so few act, were brought into play. Hell, Judgment and Death in turn
began to work upon the lad's soul--these monstrous elemental Truths that
underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it
appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all
shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these
things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard
the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free
wills that have enslaved themselves into eternal bondage by a deliberate
rejection of God--he put out his finger and tasted the bitterness of
their furious tears--the very reek of sin came to his nostrils, of that
corruption that is in existence through sin; nay, he saw the very flaming
hells red with man's wrath against his Maker.

Then he traced back, under the priest's direction, the Judgment through
which every soul must pass; he saw the dead, great and small, stand
before God; the books, black with blotted shame, were borne forth by the
recording angels and spread before the tribunal. His ears tingled with
that condemning silence of the Judge beyond Whom there is no appeal, from
whose sentence there is no respite, and from whose prison there is no
discharge; and rang with that pealing death-sentence at which the angels
hide their faces, but to which the conscience of the criminal assents
that it is just. His soul looked out at those whirling hosts on either
side, that black cloud going down to despair, that radiant company
hastening to rise to the Uncreated Light in whom there is no darkness at
all--and cried in piteous suspense to know on which side she herself one
day would be.

Then he came yet one step further back still, and told himself the story
of his death. He saw the little room where he would lie, his bed in one
corner; he saw Isabel beside the bed; he saw himself, white, gasping,
convulsed, upon it--the shadows of the doctor and the priest were upon
the wall--he heard his own quick sobbing breath, he put out his finger
and touched his own forehead wet with the death-dew--he tasted and smel