A Journal of the Plague Year

Analyze List details of the narrator's conversation with the church sexton. How does the narrator's description of this conversation affect your impression of events?

got admittance into the churchyard by being acquainted with the sexton who attended, who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly persuaded me not to go, telling me very seriously, for he was a good, religious, and sensible man, that it was indeed their business and duty to venture, and to run all hazards, and that in it they might hope to o be preserved; but that I had no apparent call to it but my own curiosity, which, he said, he believed I would not pretend was sufficient to justify my running that hazard. I told him I had been pressed in my mind to go, and that perhaps it might be an instructing sight, that might not be without its uses. "Nay," says the good man, "if you will venture upon that score, name of God go in; for, depend upon it, 't will be a sermon to you, it may be, the best that ever you heard in your life. "T is a speaking sight,” says he, “and has a voice with it, and a loud one, to call us all to repentance;” and with that he opened the door and said, “Go, if you will.”

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The Sexton attempts to persuade the narrator to turn back.... in essence, he tells the narrator that it is the job of the Church, and himself as a representative of the Church, to venture forth and do what can be done. The Sexton cautions the narrator to the hazards he faces, and in the end, tells him to enter at his own peril..... that what he is going to see will be the most effective sermon on repentance his will ever witness.

Source(s)

A Journal of the Plague Year