“As I get somewhat more accustomed to my separation from all that was so dear to me, the strangeness of my position seems to me more and more inexplicable.  All the things which are going on in Fifty-ninth Street were once all to me, and nothing appeared beyond.  To be separated from all; to look upon one’s past as a dream; to become a stranger to one’s self, wandering from city to city, from country to country, ever in a strange land and among strangers; to be attached to nothing; to see no definite future; to be an enigma to one’s self; to find no light in any one to guide me, isolated from all except God—­who will explain what all this means? where it will end? and how soon?  As I become resigned to this state of things my health suffers less.  Occasionally my interior trials and struggles are almost insupportable, but less so than if I were surrounded by those who have an affection for me.  To worry others without their being able to give me any relief would only increase my suffering, and finally become unbearable.  All is for the best!  God’s will be done!”

What he wrote to a friend suffering from illness he applied to himself; he made spiritual profit, as best he might, from separation from the men and the vocation he loved so well: 

“I can sympathize with you more completely in your sickness being myself not well.  To be shut off from the world, and cut off from human activity—­and this is what it means to be sick—­gives the soul the best conditions to love God alone, and this is Paradise upon earth.  Blessed sickness! which detaches the soul from all creatures and unites it to its sovereign Good.  But one’s duties and responsibilities, what of these in the meantime?  We must give them all up one day, and why not now?  We think ourselves necessary, and others try to make us believe the same; there is but little truth and much self-love in this.  ‘What else do I require of thee,’ says our Lord in Thomas a Kempis, ’than that thou shouldst resign thyself integrally to Me.’  This is what our Lord is fighting for in our souls.”

Yet in having his life-work torn away from him he was like a man whose leg has been crushed and then amputated, the phantom of the lost limb aching in every muscle, bone, and nerve.  This was partly the secret of his pain while in Europe, at the mere thought of his former active life; it haunted him with memories of its lost opportunities, its shortcomings in motive or achievement, or what he fancied to be such, in view of the Divine justice, now always reckoning with him.

He was ever cheerful in word, even when the pallor of his face and the blazing of his eyes betrayed his bodily and spiritual pain.  “The end of religion is joy, joy here no less than joy hereafter,” he once insisted, and he argued long and energetically for the proposition; but meantime he was racked with inner agony and was too feeble to walk alone.  In his letters and diaries he speaks of his illness and of its symptoms as of those of another person of whom he was giving news.