THE MORNING WATCH
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revere
him,
a long and consistent series of remarkable spiritual feats.
Let your lights so shine before men that they may see your good
works and glorify your Father, Which is in Heaven. But meditating
what these might
be,
he had realized that there in truth he did run
the danger of sinning through Pride, as those people do who look
hungry when they fast; whereas his own ambitions were prompted
(or so it seemed) by true religious feeling and by nothing else. These
ambitions had crystallized during the late weeks of Lent, into a desire
to do for Jesus as much as Jesus was doing for him and fOIi all souls.
He had experimented with extra fasting, but it was not possible to
carry this far, since it was virtually impossible to be excused from
meals without the sin of lying, and almost as difficult, he found, to
sit at the table without eating, or eating little enough to give the fast
any dignity or meaning. So he had chosen self-mortification instead.
He had gone into the woods and eaten worms, but this had disgusted
him, and he had been even worse disgusted when, on one occasion, he
had come near tasting his own excrement. It had suddenly struck
him
as very doubtful indeed that Jesus would ever have done any
such thing, and he had thrown the twig deep into the bushes and had
carefully buried the filth. Efforts to scourge himself had been
moderately painful but not sufficiently effective to outweigh the sense
of bashfulness, even of ridiculousness, which he felt over the clumsi–
ness of the attempt, in relation to the severity of the intention. So he
had been reduced, mainly, to keeping very bitter vigil over his
thoughts and his language and over his sensuous ,actions upon him–
self, and to finding out times and places in which it would be pos–
sible to kneel, for much longer than it was comfortable to kneel,
without danger of getting caught at it. (He had been as frightened,
once, by such an interruption, as if he had been surprised in a sexual
act.)
It was during one of these protracted and uncomfortable sojourns
on
his
knees that his mind, uneasily strained between its own wander–
ings and efforts at disciplined meditation, had become absorbed in
grateful and overwhelmed imagination of Christ Crucified, and had
without warning brought to its surface the possibility of his own
crucifixion. He had been wondering with all of a sincere heart how
ever he might do enough for the Son of God Who had done so
much for
him
when suddenly, supplanting Christ's image, he saw
