They stopped in the center of the nave and groaned with pain, their
hearts boiling with hatred and vengeance. They lifted their eyes and
hands to God, and prayed that His vengeance might fall because of the
mock done to Him here in His own house. They would gladly go to
destruction together with these fool-hardy, if only He would show His
might. Joyously they would let themselves be crushed beneath His heel,
if only He would triumph, that cries of terror, despair, and
repentance, that were too late, might rise up toward Him from these
impious lips.
And they struck up a miserere. Every note of it sounded like a cry for
the rain of fire that overwhelmed Sodom, for the strength which Samson
possessed when he pulled down the columns in the house of the
Philistines. They prayed with song and with words; they denuded their
shoulders and prayed with their scourges. They lay kneeling row after
row, stripped to their waist, and swung the sharp-pointed and knotted
cords down on their bleeding backs. Wildly and madly they beat
themselves so that the blood clung in drops on their hissing whips.
Every blow was a sacrifice to God. Would that they might beat
themselves in still another way, would that they might tear themselves
into a thousand bloody shreds here before His eyes! This body with
which they had sinned against His commandments had to be punished,
tortured, annihilated, that He might see how hateful it was to them,
that He might see how they became like unto dogs in order to please
Him, lower than dogs before His will, the lowliest of vermin that ate
the dust beneath the soles of His feet! Blow upon blow--until their
arms dropped or until cramps turned them to knots.
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