nothing!" the soul shrieks, in her frenzy. At just such points as
these, men have plunged into intemperance and wild excess,--they have
gone to be shot down in battle,--they have broken life, and thrown it
away, like an empty goblet, and gone, like wailing ghosts, out into the
dread unknown.

The possibility of all this lay in that heart which had just received
that stunning blow. Exercised and disciplined as he had been, by years
of sacrifice, by constant, unsleeping self-vigilance, there was rising
there, in that great heart, an ocean-tempest of passion, and for a
while his cries unto God seemed as empty and as vague as the screams of
birds tossed and buffeted in the clouds of mighty tempests.

The will that he thought wholly subdued seemed to rise under him as a
rebellious giant. A few hours before, he thought himself established in
an invincible submission to God's will that nothing could shake. Now he
looked into himself as into a seething vortex of rebellion, and against
all the passionate cries of his lower nature could, in the language of
an old saint, cling to God only by the naked force of his will. That
will rested unmelted amid the boiling sea of passion, waiting its hour
of renewed sway. He walked the room for hours, and then sat down to his
Bible, and roused once or twice to find his head leaning on its pages,
and his mind far gone in thoughts from which he woke with a bitter
throb. Then he determined to set himself to some definite work, and,
taking his Concordance, began busily tracing out and numbering all the
proof-texts for one of the chapters of his theological system! till, at
last, he worked himself down to such calmness that he could pray; and
then he schooled and reasoned with himself, in a style not unlike, in
its spirit, to that in which a great modern author has addressed
suffering humanity:--