“I question not, Heloise, but you will hereafter apply yourself in good earnest to the business of your salvation; this ought to be your whole concern.  Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart—­it is the best advice I can give you, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily cannot but be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue.  When you have extirpated your unhappy inclination towards me, the practice of every virtue will become easy; and when at last your life is conformable to that of Christ, death will be desirable to you.  Your soul will joyfully leave this body, and direct its flight to heaven.  Then you will appear with confidence before your Saviour; you will not read your reprobation in the Judgement Book, but you will hear your Saviour say:  ’Come, partake of My glory, and enjoy the eternal reward I have appointed for those virtues you have practised.’

“Farewell, Heloise, this is the last advice of your dear Abelard; for the last time let me persuade you to follow the rules of the Gospel.  Heaven grant that your heart, once so sensible of my love, may now yield to be directed by my zeal.  May the idea of your loving Abelard, always present to your mind, be now changed into the image of Abelard truly and sincerely penitent; and may you shed as many tears for your salvation as you have done for our misfortunes.”

Then the silence falls for ever.

* * * * *

HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL

Fragments of an Intimate Diary

Henri Frederic Amiel, born at Geneva on September 21, 1821, was educated there, and later at the University of Berlin; and held a professorship at the University of Geneva from 1849 until his death, on March 11, 1881.  The “Journal Intime,” of which we give a summary, was published in 1882-84, and an English translation by Mrs. Humphrey Ward appeared in 1885.  The book has the profound interest which attaches to all genuine personal confessions of the interior life; but it has the further claim to notice that it is the signal expression of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the modern spirit.  The book perfectly renders the disillusion, languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred scepticism.  It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost delicacy of perception.  Amiel wrote also several essays and poems, but it is for the “Intimate Diary” alone that his name will be remembered.

Thoughts on Life and Conduct

Only one thing is needful—­to possess God.  The senses, the powers of the soul, and all outward resources are so many vistas opening upon Divinity, so many ways of tasting and adoring God.  To be detached from all that is fugitive, and to seize only on the eternal and the absolute, using the rest as no more than a loan, a tenancy!  To worship, understand, receive, feel, give, act—­this is your law, your duty, your heaven!