that relieve and console.  There shall befall you that which befell the nun whose memory is preserved for us in the old legends.  Listening to the forest voices she had gone, following them always, as far as the thick solitudes where nothing any longer comes to trouble the collected soul.  There, in the shade of a tree where she had seated herself, she heard a song till then unknown to her ears.  It was the song of the mystic bird.  This song said, in marvelous modulations, all that man thinks and feels, all that he suffers, all that he seeks, all that falls short of fulfilment for him.  It summed up in harmonies the destinies of living beings and the immense pity that is at the root of things.  Softly, on light, strong wings, it lifted the soul to the heights where it looks upon reality.  And the nun, her hands clasped, listened, listened without end, forgetting earth, sky, time, forgetting herself.  She listened for centuries without ever growing tired, finding in the song that charmed her a sweetness forever new.  Dear and truthful image of what the soul experiences when, mute, as respectful as a child and as ready of belief, it listens in the universal silence to the voices that translate for it the things that are eternal!

All those who have become voices have traveled this way.  At Patmos or in the desert, on Horeb or on Sinai, they have trembled with fright or started with joy.  But everything has its time.  There comes a day when all voices, soft or terrible, that man has heard, grow still, to let henceforth only one be heard, which cries to him:  “Go! go now and be a witness of the things you have heard!  Go!  I send you forth as lambs among wolves!  Go!  I send you toward men whose brow is harsh, whose heart is wicked, but fear nothing, I shall embolden your face, I shall give you a heart of brass and a forehead of diamond.”

When that moment has come, one must, in order to remain faithful to his mission, remember that after all he is only a voice.  Truth does not belong to us, it is we who belong to truth!  Wo to him who possesses it and treats it as something that belongs to himself.  Happy is he who is possest by it!  No preference, no kinship, no sympathy counts here.  Alas! it is not thus that men understand it.  It is for this reason that they degrade truth and that it becomes without power in their hands.  Instead of winging its way heavenward in vigorous flight, it crawls along the earth, like an eagle whose wings have been broken.  Nothing is sadder than to see how those who ought to lend their voice to truth, turn it to their own uses and play with it.  The voice, human speech, that sacred organ, whose whole worth lies in sincerity, has in all ages been the victim of odious profanations.  But in this age it is more than ever attainted.  The evil from which it suffers is defilement.