y in God, his
repose and hope, his immortal life. Now he knew, he would rely on his
Saviour. He would write a book about Jesus. Not a proper literary
work; he could not do that, he had no talent for it. But he would
represent the Lord as He lived, he would inweave his whole soul with
the being of his Saviour so that he might have a friend in the cell.
Then perhaps his terrors would vanish. In former days it had pleased
him, so to speak, to write away an anxiety from his heart, not in
letters to others, but only for himself. Many things which were not
clear to him, which he found incomprehensible--with pen in hand he
succeeded in making clearer to his inward eye, so that vague pictures
almost assumed corporeal shape. He had in that fashion created many
comrades and many companions during his wanderings in strange lands
when he was afraid. So now in his forlorn and deserted condition he
would try to invite the Saviour into the poor sinner's cell. No
outward help was to be hoped, he must evoke it all out of himself. He
would venture to implore the Lord Jesus until He came, using his
childish memories, the remains of his school learning, the fragments of
his reading, and, above all, his mother's Bible stories.

And now the condemned man began to write a book in so far as it was
possible to him. At first his dreams and thoughts and figures were
disconnected through timidity, and the painful excitement which often
made his pulses gallop and his heart stop beating. Then he cowered in
the corner, and wept and groaned and struggled in vain with the desire
for mortal life. When he succeeded in collecting his thoughts again,
and he took up his pen afresh, he gradually regained calm, and each
time it lasted longer. And it happened that he often wrote for hours
at a stretch, that his cheeks began to glow and his eyes to shine--for
he wandered with Jesus in Galilee. Suddenly he would awake from his
visions and find himself in his prison cell, and sadness overcame him,
but it was no longer a falling into the pit of hell; he was strong
enough to save himself on his island of the blessed. And so he wrote
and wrote. He did not ask if it was the Saviour of the books. It was
his Saviour as he lived in him, the only Saviour who could redeem him.
And so there was accomplished in this poor sinner on a small scale what
was accomplished among the nations on a large scale; if it was not
always the historical Jesus as Saviour, i