His own conscience was passing in those stars, which gazed upon him so austerely, knowing he was about to review--before the threatening hour of death--the whole moral history of his life, to tell it in words which would be a first judgment, pronounced in the name of the God of Justice, impelled by the God of Love; in words that would not be lost, because no movement is lost; which would appear--who knows how, who knows where, who knows when ?--to the glory of Christ, as the supreme testimony of a spirit to moral Truth, directed against itself.

Thus the silent stars spoke to him, animated by his own thoughts.

And his life was pictured in his mind from beginning to end, the external, salient outline less strongly marked than the inner moral substance.

He saw all the first part of it dominated by a religious conception in which egotism prevailed, and so ordered as to make the love of God and the love of man converge into an individual well-being, the aim being personal perfection, and reward.

He was grieved that he had thus obeyed in words only the law which places the love of God before the love of self; and it was a gentle grief, not because it was easy to find excuses for this error, to impute it to teachers, but because it was sweet to feel his own minuteness in the wave of grace which enveloped him.