The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize his
religious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was useless
any longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly kill him in
growth and spirit as the rags had killed the locust in sap and bud.
Whatever they might be to others--and he judged no man--for him with
his peculiar nature they could never be life-vestments; they would
become his spiritual grave-clothes.

The parallel went a little way further: that scant faltering green!
that unconquerable effort of the tree to assert despite all deadening
experiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like, could he go
back to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as he now recalled
the simple faith of what had already seemed to him 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