his childhood. Through the mist blinding his vision, through the
doubts blinding his brain, still could he see it lying there clear
in the near distance! "No," he cried, "into whatsoever future I may
be driven to enter, closed against me is the peace of my past.
Return thither my eyes ever will, my feet never!"

"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannot
believe what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I
CAN believe. The Truth, the Law--I must find these and quickly!"

From all of which, though thus obscurely set forth, it will be
divined that the lad had now reached, indeed for some days had
stood halting, at one of the great partings of the ways: when the
whole of Life's road can be walked in by us no longer; when we must
elect the half we shall henceforth follow, and having taken it,
ever afterward perhaps look yearningly back upon the other as a
lost trail of the mind.

The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up his
bewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was one
immemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's
single road into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less
than a year, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of
what he esteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the
town, where each of the many churches was proclaiming itself the
sole incarnation of this and all others the embodiment of something
false, he had, after months of distracted wandering among their
contradictory clamors, passed as so many have passed before him
into that state of mind which rejects them all and asks whether
such a thing as true religion anywhere exists.