He
remained reverently silent.
Benedetto sought the stars with his eyes. 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.
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