t
the faint sickly atmosphere that hangs about a death chamber; and he
watched the grey shadow of Azrael's wing creep across his face. Then he
saw the sheet and the stiff form beneath it; and knew that they were his
features that were hidden; and that they were his feet that stood up
stark below the covering. Then he visited his own grave, and saw the
month-old grass blowing upon it, and the little cross at the head; then
he dug down through the soil, swept away the earth from his coffin-plate;
drew the screws and lifted the lid....

Then he placed sin beneath the white light; dissected it, analysed it,
weighed it and calculated its worth, watched its development in the
congenial surroundings of an innocent soul, that is rich in grace and
leisure and gifts, and saw the astonishing reversal of God's primal law
illustrated in the process of corruption--the fair, sweet, fragrant
creature passing into foulness. He looked carefully at the stages and
modes of sin--venial sins, those tiny ulcers that weaken, poison and
spoil the soul, even if they do not slay it--lukewarmness, that deathly
slumber that engulfs the living thing into gradual death--and, finally,
mortal sin, that one and only wholly hideous thing. He saw the
indescribable sight of a naked soul in mortal sin; he saw how the earth
shrank from it, how nature grew silent at it, how the sun darkened at it,
how hell yelled at it, and the Love of God sickened at it.

And so, as the purgative days went by, these tempests poured over his
soul, sifted through it, as the sea through a hanging weed, till all that
was not organically part of his life was swept away, and he was left a
simple soul alone with God. Then the second process began.

To change the metaphor, the canvas was now prepared, scoured, bleached
and stretched. What is the image to be painted upon it? It is the image
of Christ.

Now Father Robert laid aside his knives and his hammer, and took up his
soft brushes, and began stroke by stroke, with colours beyond imagining,
to lay upon the eager canvas the likeness of an adorable Lover and King.
Anthony watched the portrait grow day by day with increasing wonder. Was
this indeed the Jesus of Nazareth of whom he had read in the Gospels? he
rubbed his eyes and looked; and yet there was no possibility of
mistake,--line for line it was the same.

But this portrait grew and breathed and moved, and passed through all the
stages of man's life. First it was the Eter