A Soldier's Last Prayer

[…] Ought not to leave this world without [knowing] Him. Touched by his frank and sincere expression, I replied, 'I will aid you to know Him, and [it will be easy], as such things are easy for those of upright, candid heart.' But it was not so very easy after all, as you will readily perceive. When, by the assistance of many questions, I had finished his confession for him, [I found] he had not the first idea of religion, or of the sacrament of penance, or of any other sacrament.

A poor dying man, whose hairs were bleached by the snows of almost fourscore winters, was passing from earth without having a single idea of Christianity; merely an instinct prompted him to wish for a reconciliation with God before his death.

I explained the meaning of penance, and said, 'You suffer very much; offer your sufferings to our Blessed Lord, and that will enable me to give you an easy penance—you need only say the Our Father and Hail Mary.' He looked at me for a moment with the most intent and searching gaze, for although exhausted by age and sickness he had a most extraordinary energy in his eye, and then said, 'Our Father—Hail Mary—what do they mean? Really I have never heard anything about them.' Yes, this was the state to which, [...] seventy-four years old, he had come; he had forgotten even the prayers that his mother had taught him in childish innocence. Religion was utterly obliterated from his soul.

There remained [nothing], and I felt that a miracle was needed to bring back the past, or to enlighten his darkened soul.

'You ought to know,' I said, 'that those prayers are the most beautiful in religion. I will say them; you will say them after me, and then we will [see].' Kneeling down by his bedside, and holding both of his hands in mine, I commenced. He let me say the two or three first invocations of the Our Father, but when I said, 'forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,' he suddenly pressed my hand, and, as one aroused from a long sleep, he exclaimed, 'Oh! I remember that. Yes, I think when I was a little boy my mother taught me something like that. Will you please commence it again?' I recommenced, and then, instantaneously, from the depths of his soul, across his darkened mind, and from far away down in his early childhood, across all those seventy-four years and all those battle-fields which had passed over his life and effaced from his soul all ideas of religion, came back to this old soldier the remembrance of his mother, and the prayer she had taught him when a little boy, and he commenced, unaided, to recall the words. One by one I saw them leave his soul as if they had all been engulfed and were now rising to the surface. At each sentence he interrupted himself. 'Oh!' he exclaimed, 'I remember—Our Father, who art in Heaven—yes, indeed, that is it—hallowed be thy name—that is it, again I remember it all now—thy kingdom come—yes, yes, I remember. I used to say all that. Oh, isn't that prayer beautiful!' And when he came to the words, 'above all the rest, I remember that—those are the words that brought all the rest back to me; my mother used to make me say that whenever I did anything wrong.' In this manner he finished the Our Father; then he asked to say it with me, and seemed never weary of repeating it over and over.

I had nothing more to do but [...]