“And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go
ye out to meet him. . . . And they that were ready went in with him
to the marriage; and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other
virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
“But he answered and said, Verily, I say unto you, I know you not.
“Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the
Son of man cometh.”
After reading these verses in a loud voice, my father closed the Bible;
in the room where we were assembled there was a sound of chairs being
moved and we all went down upon our knees to pray. Following the usage
in old Huguenot families, it was our custom to have prayers just before
retiring to our rooms for the night.
“And the door was shut. . . .” Although I still knelt I no longer heard
the prayer, for the foolish virgins appeared to me. They were enveloped
in white veils that billowed about them as they stood before the door
holding in their hands the little lamps whose flickering flames were so
soon to be extinguished, leaving them in the gloom without before that
closed door, closed against them irrevocably and forever. . . . And a
time could come then when it would be too late; when the Saviour weary
of our trespassing would no longer listen to our supplications! I had
never thought that that was possible. And a fear more terrifying and
awful than any I had ever known before completely overwhelmed me at the
thought of eternal damnation. . . .
* * * * *
For a long time, for many weeks and months, the parable of the foolish
virgins haunted me. And every evening, when darkness came, I would
repeat to myself the words that sounded so beautiful and yet so
dismaying: “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour
wherein the Son of man cometh.” If he should come to-night, was ever
my thought, I would be awakened by a noise as of the sound of rushing
waters, by the blare of the trumpet of the angel of the Lord announcing
the terrifying approach of the end of the world. And I could never go to
sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I commended myself to the
mercy of my Saviour.
I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive
conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I
was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused
me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented
for days merely because in relating something I had not reported
it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I carry my
squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or
statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells
over his beads, these words: “After all, perhaps I do not remember just
exactly how it was.” When I think of the thousand remorses and fears
which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which from my sixth to
my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel a sort of
retrospective depression.
At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future,
when a man, without hesitation I would answer: “I expect to be a
minister,”--and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest
one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought,
inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.
In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that
hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror:
eternity. And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had
scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most
colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a
blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to
be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great
splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones around
the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a
great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and
continuously in the infinite void of heaven.