otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:”  to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything.  Unhappy young man!  All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn.  Well might he exclaim, in his wild way:  “Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go?  Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Phantasm, made up of Desire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Doctor Graham’s Celestial-Bed?  Happiness of an approving Conscience!  Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that he was ’the chief of sinners;’ and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling?  Foolish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,—­I tell thee, Nay!  To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice.  What then?  Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by?  I know not:  only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray.  With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much.  But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver!  Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold:  there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect!”

Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo.  It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim.  To such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him.  “But what boots it (was thut’s)?” cries he:  “it is but the common lot in this era.  Not having come to spiritual majority prior to the Siecle de Louis Quinze, and not being born purely a Loghead (Dummkopf ), thou hadst no other outlook.  The whole world is, like thee, sold to Unbelief; their old Temples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rain-proof, crumble down; and men ask now:  Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?”