Thousand
like it, grown under glass in a prepared soil, in a nursery.
That I had to say good-bye to all thoughts of a career, all bright
dreams of the future which recent readings had put into my mind, was
not felt as the chief loss, it was in fact a small matter compared
with the dreadful thought that I must soon resign this earthly life
which was so much more to me, as I could not help thinking, than to
most others. I was like that young man with a ghastly face I had seen
bound to a post in our barn; or like any wretched captive, tied hand
and foot and left to lie there until it suited his captor to come back
and cut his throat or thrust him through with a spear, or cut him into
strips with a sword, in a leisurely manner so as to get all the
satisfaction possible out of the exercise of his skill and the
spectacle of gushing blood and his victim's agony.
Nor was this all nor even the worst which had be-fallen me; I now
discovered that in spite of all my strivings after the religious mind,
that old dread of annihilation which I had first experienced as a
small child was not dead as I had fondly imagined, but still lived and
worked in me. This visible world - this paradise of which I had had so
far but a fleeting glimpse-the sun and moon and other worlds peopling
all space with their brilliant constellations, and still other suns
and systems, so utterly remote, in such inconceivable numbers as to
appear to our vision as a faint luminous mist in the sky-all this
universe which had existed for millions and billions of ages, or from
eternity, would have existed in vain, since now it was doomed with my
last breath, my last gleam of consciousness, to come to nothing. For
that was how the thought of death presented itself to me.
Against this appalling thought I struggled with all my power, and
prayed and prayed again, morning, noon and night, wrestling with God,
as the phrase was, trying as it were to wring something from His hands
which would save me, and which He, for no reason that I could
discover, withheld from me.
It was not strange in these circumstances that I became more and more
absorbed in the religious literature of which we had a good amount on
our bookshelves - theology, sermons, meditations for every day in the
year, _The Whole Duty of Man, A Call to the Unconverted_, and many
other old works of a similar character.
Among these I found one entitled, if I remember rightly, _An Answer_
to the Infidel, and this work, which I took up eagerly in the
expectation that it would allay those maddening doubts perpetually
rising in my mind and be a help and comfort to me, only served to make
matters worse, at all events for a time.
