their households; how many a woman, eager for widows' weeds, has
given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last
sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to
inherit their fathers' wealth; and how fair damsels--blush not,
sweet ones--have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me,
the sole guest to an infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your
human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places--whether
in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest--where crime has
been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one
stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It
shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of
sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly
supplies more evil impulses than human power--than my power at
its utmost--can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children,
look upon each other."

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the
wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband,
trembling before that unhallowed altar.

"Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and
solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his
once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.
"Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that
virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the
nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome
again, my children, to the communion of your race."

"Welcome," repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair
and triumph.