I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to
the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still
retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will
spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling,
grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot
their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not
immediately seek distraction in a gorge.

Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse
than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all
kinds of sin than I. Happily, my course was arrested in time--before I
had earned absolute destruction--and for long years I have been slowly
and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards better things. And
when I look back, what do I find to have been the agents of my
redemption? The hope of immortality or of future reward? I can honestly
say that for these fourteen years such a consideration has not entered
my head. No, I can tell you exactly what has been at work. "Sartor
Resartus" led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible
with the entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods
gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition. Thirdly,
love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature, and
impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility.

If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a
man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science,
if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me,
if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy's grave my
sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because
these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared
whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All