It was during the gloomy midnight of Popery, that a convent at Basle, a poor Carthusian friar, named Martin, wrote the following touching confession within his lonely cell:" O most merciful God! I know that I cannot be saved, and satisfy Thy righteousness otherwise than by the merits, by the innocent passion, and by the death of Thy dearly beloved Son ... ... Holy Jesus! all my salvation is in Thy hands Thou canst not turn away from me the hands of Thy love, for they have created. me and redeemed me. Thou host written my name with an iron pen, in great mercy, and in an indelible manner, on Thy side, on Thy hands, and on Thy feet... And if I cannot confess these things with my mouth, I confess them at least with my pen and with My HEART."
Then the good Carthusian friar placed his confession in a wooden box, and enclosed it in a hole in the wall of his cell, where it lay hidden for hundreds of years.
The old convent where, he wrote his living words Lid well nigh crumbled away, and the friar's ashes had mingled with the dust, when, in the month of December, 1776, some workmen in pulling down an old building that had formed part of the same Carthusian convent, stumbled on the box, and thus was brought to light the sweet confession, which no human eye had seen since it had been placed in that wall by the hand of the good man.
He being dead yet speaketh!