icked?

We do not yet know that in the soul's search for truth the bitterness
lies here, the striving cannot always hide itself among the thoughts;
sooner or later it will clothe itself in outward action; then it steps
in and divides between the soul and what it loves. All things on earth
have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for
love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the
path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart.

VI.

Then at last a new time--the time of waking; short, sharp, and not
pleasant, as wakings often are.

Sleep and dreams exist on this condition--that no one wake the dreamer.

And now life takes us up between her finger and thumb, shakes us
furiously, till our poor nodding head is well-nigh rolled from our
shoulders, and she sets us down a little hard on the bare earth, bruised
and sore, but preternaturally wide awake.

We have said in our days of dreaming, "Injustice and wrong are a
seeming; pain is a shadow. Our God, He is real, He who made all things,
and He only is Love."

Now life takes us by the neck and shows us a few other things,--new-made
graves with the red sand flying about them; eyes that we love with the
worms eating them; evil men walking sleek and fat, the whole terrible
hurly-burly of the thing called life,--and she says, "What do you think
of these?" We dare not say "Nothing." We feel them; they are very real.
But we try to lay our hands about and feel that other thing we felt
before. In the dark night in the fuel-room we cry to our Beautiful
dream-god: "Oh, let us come near you, and lay our head against your
feet. Now in our hour of need be near us." But He is not there; He is
gone away. The old questioning devil is there.

We must have been awakened sooner or later. The imagination cannot
always triumph over reality, the desire over truth. We must have been
awakened. If it was done a little sharply, what matter? It was done
thoroughly, and it had to be done.

VII.

And a new life begins for us--a new time, a life as cold as that of
a man who sits on the pinnacle of an iceberg and sees the glittering
crystals all about him. The old looks indeed like a long hot delirium,
peopled with phantasies. The new is cold enough.

Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed
down to us, that we hated, and never liked: the new one that we made for
ourselves, that we loved; but n