ts, Livy helping them, continued the
same work and completed it. But, bent with most serious and earnest
desires toward truth on what seemed to me the greatest theme, I could
not remain where I was, and turned with highest expectations to the
philosophers. I not only read, but I studied and pondered them with
diligence, and with as sincere a desire of arriving at truth as ever
scholar sat at the feet of his instructer. The result was anything but
satisfying, I ended a universal sceptic, so far as human systems of
philosophy were concerned, so far as they pretended to solve the enigma
of God and man, of life and death; but with a heart, nevertheless,
yearning after truth; and even full of faith, if that may be called
faith which would instinctively lay hold upon a God and a hope of
immortality; and, though beaten back once and again, by every form which
the syllogism could assume, still keep its hold.

This was my state, Fausta, when I was found by Christianity. Without
faith, and yet with it; doubting, and yet believing; rejecting
philosophy, but leaning upon nature; dissatisfied, but hoping. I cannot
easily find words to tell you the change which Christian faith has
wrought within me. All I can say is this, that I am now a new man; I am
made over again; I am born as it were into another world. Where darkness
once was, there is now light brighter than the sun. Where doubt was,
there is now certainty. I have knowledge and truth, for error and
perplexity. The inner world of my mind is resplendent with a day whose
luminary will never set. And even the outer world of appearances and
forms shines more gloriously, and has an air of reality which before it
never had. It used to seem to me like the gorgeous fabric of a dream,
and as if, at some unexpected moment, it might melt into air and
nothingness, and I, and all men and things, with it; for there appeared
to be no purpose in it; it came from nothing, it achieved nothing, and
certainly seemed to conduct to nothing. Men, like insects, came and
went; were born, and died, and that was all. Nothing was accomplished,
nothing perfected. But now, nature seems to me stable, and eternal as
God himself. The world being the great birth-place and nursery of these
myriads of creatures, made, as I ever conceived, in a divine likeness,
after some godlike model,--for what spirit of other spheres can be more
beautiful than a perfect man, or a perfect woman--each animated with the
principle