The dark and terrible destiny was
fulfilled. The enthusiast for the right and the fanatic for the wrong;
the man who had toiled to reform the Church, and the man who had toiled
to restore the Temple; the master who had received and trusted the
servant in his home, and the servant who in that home had betrayed the
master's trust--the two characters, separated hitherto in the sublime
disunion of good and bad, now struck together in tremendous contact, as
brethren who had drawn their life from one source, who as children had
been sheltered under the same roof!
Not in the hours when the good Christian succoured the then forsaken
Pagan, wandering homeless in Rome, was the secret disclosed; no chance
word of it was uttered when the deceiver told the feigned relation of
his life to the benefactor whom he was plotting to deceive, or when, on
the first morning of the siege, the machinations of the servant
triumphed over the confidence of the master: it was reserved to be
revealed in the words of delirium, at the closing years of madness, when
he who discovered it was unconscious of all that he spoke, and his eyes
were blinded to the true nature of all that he saw; when earthly voices
that might once have called him back to repentance, to recognition, and
to love, were become to him as sounds that have no meaning; when, by a
ruthless and startling fatality, it was on the brother who had wrought
for the true faith that the whole crushing weight of the terrible
disclosure fell, unpartaken by the brother who had wrought for the
false! But the judgments pronounced in Time go forth from the tribunal
of that Eternity to which the mysteries of life tend, and in which they
shall be revealed--neither waiting on human seasons nor abiding by human
justice, but speaking to the soul in the language of immortality, which
is heard in the world that is now, and interpreted in the world that is
to come.
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