y in the things
tangible. They are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful in their
daily lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot, cast on an
iron shore and forced to win their scanty bread at the risk of their
lives. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind. What should I say
to them? I, whose whole life is one restless impatience, one petulant
mutiny against circumstance? If I talk with them I only take them what
the world always takes into solitude--discontent. It would be a cruel
gift, yet my hand is incapable of holding out any other. It is a homely
saying that no blood comes out of a stone; so, out of a life saturated
with the ironies, the contempt, the disbelief, the frivolous
philosophies, the hopeless negations of what we call Society, there can
be drawn no water of hope and charity, for the well-head--belief--is
dried up at its source. Some pretend, indeed, to find in humanity what
they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical
exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to
replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious
bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that
would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless
of all. If humanity be but a _vibrion_, a conglomeration of gases, a
mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle of phosphorus and carbon,
how can it contain the elements of worship? what matter when or how each
bubble of it bursts? This is the weakness of all materialism when it
attempts to ally itself with duty. It becomes ridiculous. The _carpi
diem_ of the classic sensualists, the morality of the 'Satyricon' or the
'Decamerone,' are its only natural concomitants and outcome; but as yet
it is not honest enough to say this. It affects the soothsayer's long
robe, the sacerdotal frown, and is a hypocrite."

In answer she wrote back to him:

"I do not urge you to have my faith: what is the use? Goethe was right.
It is a question between a man and his own heart. No one should venture
to intrude there. But taking life even as you do, it is surely a casket
of mysteries. May we not trust that at the bottom of it, as at the
bottom of Pandora's, there may be hope? I wish again to think with
Goethe that immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness to be
achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity
of purpose--a reward allotted to the just. This i