Why not just stop at sixty, keeping the secret till his dying breath? Why not simply swear off the monks and live in penance as a hermit? Why not, indeed, become a monk himself? Therein lies the solution! There must have been something stronger than the stake, the fire, even the habit of twenty years! There must have been an idea more powerful than any disaster, famine, torture, plague, leprosy, and all that hell which mankind could not have borne without that one binding idea which directed men’s minds and fertilized the springs of life! Show me anything resembling that power in our age of
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