elings of my mind during all these experiences and observations
were mingled with a heart-torment which I can only describe as a
searching after God. This search was a feeling rather than a course of
reasoning. For it came from my heart, and was actually opposed to my way
of thinking. Kant had shown the impossibility of proving the existence
of God, yet I still hoped to find Him, and I still addressed Him in
prayer. Yet I did not find Him whom I sought.

At times I contended against the reasoning of Kant and Schopenhauer, and
argued that causation is not in the same category with thought and space
and time. I argued that if I existed, there was a cause of my being, and
that cause was the cause of all causes. Then I pondered the idea that
the cause of all things is what is called God, and with all my powers I
strove to attain a sense of the presence of this cause.

Directly I became conscious of a power over me I felt a possibility of
living. Then I asked myself what was this cause, and what was my
relation to what I called God? Simply the old familiar answer occurred
to me, that God is the creator, the giver of all. Yet I was dissatisfied
and fearful, and the more I prayed, the more convinced I was that I was
not heard. In my despair I cried aloud for mercy, but no one had mercy
on me, and I felt as if life stagnated within me.

Yet the conviction kept recurring that I must have appeared in this
world with some motive on the part of some one who had sent me into it.
If I had been sent here, who sent me? I had not been like a fledgling
flung out of a nest to perish. Some one had cared for me, had loved me.
Who was it? Again came the same answer, God. He knew and saw my fear, my
despair, and so I passed from the consideration of the existence of God,
which was proved, on to that of our relation towards him as our Redeemer
through His Son. But I felt this to be a thing apart from me and from
the world, and this God vanished like melting ice from my eyes. Again I
was left in despair. I felt there was nothing left but to put an end to
my life; yet I knew that I should never do this.

Thus did moods of joy and despair come and go, till one day, when I was
listening to the sounds in a forest, and was still on that day in the
early springtide seeking after God in my thoughts, a flash of joy
illumined my soul. I realised that the conception of God was not God
Himself. I felt that I had only truly lived when I believed in God.