nal of the soul,
which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting
and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and
importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others. There
are things in my own past, which would be met with laughter and
ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to
recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded
upon the mind. There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed,
which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a
sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed
them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems
so wholly independent of tradition or convention.

And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of
redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to
be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands
of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to
loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of
darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent;
and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation
in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when
the sincere conscience does not condemn.

XXI

I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent
panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic
cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under
the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating
argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a
strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his
rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I
had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One
thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit
resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the
latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a
sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and
desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But
I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the
modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail,
while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the
causes of t