The Two Students and the Bell at Matins

Set in a city of Flanders, in the year 1604.

In the year 1604, in a city of Flanders, there were two young students who, instead of attending to their studies, gave themselves over to dissolute living. One night they went together to a house of ill repute. After a while one of them, named Richard, went home, but the other stayed behind.

Back in his room and getting ready for bed, Richard remembered that he had not yet said his usual daily Hail Marys. Heavy with sleep and worn out, he roused himself and said them, though without devotion and only half awake, and then lay down. He had just fallen asleep when a loud knocking came at the door, and before he could open it he saw his companion standing before him, hideous and ghastly. "Who are you?" he asked. "Do you not know me?" the other replied. "But what has changed you so? You look like a demon." "I am damned," the wretched man cried. "When I left that house a devil set upon me and strangled me. My body lies in the middle of the street, and my soul is in hell. The same punishment was meant for you, but the Blessed Virgin, for the sake of those few Hail Marys you said in her honor, has saved you. Happy will you be if you take the warning the Mother of God sends you through me."

Then he opened his cloak, showed the fire and serpents that were tormenting him, and vanished. Richard threw himself face down on the ground in floods of tears to thank Mary, his deliverer. As he turned over in his mind the thought of changing his life, he heard the matins bell of a nearby Franciscan monastery and exclaimed, "That is where God is calling me to do penance."

He went at once to beg the friars to receive him. Knowing how bad his life had been, they hesitated, but when he told them, weeping, what had happened, two of them went out to search the street and found there the body of his companion, marked by strangulation and black as coal. Richard was received into the order.

From then on he lived an exemplary life, went to India to preach the faith, passed from there to Japan, and at last had the grace of dying a martyr for Jesus Christ, burned alive.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the "example" stories that St. Alphonsus Liguori placed at the end of each section of The Glories of Mary. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the 1888 English translation. Liguori himself, in his author's "Protest," noted that the miracles and apparitions in the book are offered on human authority only, not as articles of faith.