One evening--the minister scorned no trick likely to produce an effect
on his hard-headed pupils--they were having a lesson in the choir. It
was in January. Two gas jets lighted up the choir, illuminating and
distorting the marble figures on the altar. The whole of the large
church with its two barrel-vaults, which crossed one another, lay in
semi-darkness. In the background the shining organ pipes faintly
reflected the gas flames; above it the angels blowing their trumpets
to summon the sleepers before the judgment seat of their maker, looked
merely like sinister, threatening human figures above life size; the
cloisters were lost in complete darkness.
The minister had explained the seventh commandment. He had spoken of
immorality between married and unmarried people. He could not explain
to his pupils what immorality between husband and wife meant, although
he was a married man himself; but on the subject of immorality in all
its other aspects he was well-informed. He went on to the subject of
self-abuse. As he pronounced the word a rustling sound passed through
the rows of young men; they stared at him, with white cheeks and
hollow eyes, as if a phantom had appeared in their midst. As long as
he kept to the tortures of hell fire, they remained fairly indifferent,
but when he took up a book and read to them accounts of youths who had
died at the age of twenty-five of consumption of the spine, they
collapsed in their seats, and felt as if the floor were giving way
beneath them! He told them the story of a young boy who was committed
to an asylum at the age of twelve, and died at the age of fourteen,
having found peace in the faith of his Redeemer.
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