but this personality you all worship, is
it not a creation?"

I now felt this to be the great point of the demon's urging; it recurred
too often not to be designed. Led on by the sophistry of my tempter, I
had floated unconsciously to this issue, practically admitting all; but
when this suggestion stood completely unclothed before me, my soul rose
in horror at the abyss before it. For an instant all was chaos, and the
very order of Nature seemed disorder. Life and light vanished from the
face of the earth; my night made all things dead and dark. A universe
without a God! Creation seemed to me for that moment but a galvanized
corse. What my emotions were no human being who has not felt them can
conceive. My first impulse was to suicide; with the next I cried from
the depths of my despair, "God deliver me from the body of this death!"
It was but a moment,--and there came, in the place of the cold
questioning voice of my daemon, one of ineffable music, repeating words
familiar to me from childhood, words linked to everything loved and
lovely in my past:--"Ye believe in God, believe also in me." The hot
tears for another moment blotted out the world from sight. I said once
more to the questioner, "Now who _are_ you?"

"Your own doubts," was the reply; and it seemed as if only I spoke to
myself.

Since that day I have never reasoned with my doubts, never doubted my
imagination.

ALL'S WELL.

Sweet-voiced Hope, thy fine discourse
Foretold not half life's good to me;
Thy painter, Fancy, hath not force
To show how sweet it is to be!
Thy witching dream
And pictured scheme
To match the fact still want the power;
Thy promise brave
From birth to grave
Life's boon may beggar in an hour.

Ask and receive,--'tis sweetly said;
Yet what to plead for know I not;
For Wish is worsted, Hope o'ersped,
And aye to thanks returns my thought.
If I would pray,
I've nought to say
But this, that God may be God still;
For Him to live
Is still to give,
And sweeter than my wish his will.

O wealth of life beyond all bound!
Eternity each moment given!
What plummet may the Present sound?
Who promises a _future_ heaven?
Or glad, or grieved,
Oppressed, relieved,
In blackest night, or brightest day,
Still pours the flood
Of golden good,
And more than he