--whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite
sorrows have been permitted to invade it;--whether, above all, He be
propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in
the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all
benignant;--how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;--whether
he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the
sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible
indifference;--whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he
has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan
in the universe;--whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a
mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious existence;
--whether, as the Pantheist declares, the universe itself be God,--
ever making, never made,--the product of an evolution of an infinite
series of 'antecedents' and 'consequents'; a God of which--for I
cannot say of whom--you and I are bits; perishable fragments of a
Divinity, itself imperishable only because there will always be bits
of it to perish;--whether, even upon some such supposition, this
conscious existence of ours is to be renewed; and, if under what
conditions; or whether, when we have finished our little day, no
other dawn is to break upon our night;--whether the vale, vale in
eternum vale, is really the proper utterance of a breaking heart as it
closes the sepulchre on the object of its love."

His voice faltered; and I was confirmed in my suspicions, that some
deep, secret sorrow had had to do with his morbid state of mind. In
a moment, he resumed:--

"These are the questions, and others like the them, which I have
vainly toiled to solve. I, like you, have been rudely driven out
of my old beliefs; my early Christian faith has given way to doubt;