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For Amiel there was no facile gathering of gold. (I quote him in different moods because he is so human and so honest, never posing, and incapable of cant. He is always earnestly exposing his inmost thoughts to the searchlight of truth.) When he knew the course that his disease was likely to take, he asked himself what he believed about the government of the world. Was it in the hands of “an indifferent Nature? A Satanic principle of things? A good and just God? Three points of view. The second is improbable and horrible. The first appeals to our stoicism. The third alone can give joy. Only, is it tenable? Is there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of our life?” Finally he comes to this: there is such a God; it is possible to triumph over pain and death. In willing what God commands, in consenting to what He takes from us or refuses—in this we find our peace.
“What does the apotheosis of the cross mean, if not the death of death, the defeat of sin, the raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain—O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? By long brooding over this theme—the agony of the just, peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace—humanity came to understand that a new religion was born, a new mode, that is to say, of explaining life and of understanding suffering.”
Sometimes in an hour of deep fatigue his light burns dimly, but always spiritual airs fan the fainting flame, and it rises and triumphs. “What dupes we are of our own desires! Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. All things work together for his good.” After seven years’ illness and after the fourteenth night running in which he had been consumed by sleeplessness, he is still set on doing the last things well. Five days later he writes his last words, “My flesh and my heart fail me.” “Que vivre est difficile, mon cœur fatigue!” And then his Lord said, “It is enough”; and what Amiel’s next words were we do not know.
Only we know he became at that moment a companion of immortals. He saw then as they see. He saw why suffering must be the law of life. He saw his ruin not like a black rock jutting harshly through the white spray of the flowers, but like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone clear as crystal.
The ruin accepted as part of our landscape, the loss accepted for love of our dear Lord, bears the image of the earthy now; but the day will come when (like ourselves) it will bear the image of the heavenly. For, said our Lord and Saviour before He was offered up, “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.”
Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden, and ever since in every garden of His lovers there has been a cross.