Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes wicked.  Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God’s existence.  “One circumstance I note,” says he:  “after all the nameless woe that Inquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me!  I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my allegiance to her.  ‘Truth!’ I cried, ’though the Heavens crush me for following her:  no Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy.’  In conduct it was the same.  Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me This thou shalt do, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would I have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire.  Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me:  living without God in the world, of God’s light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.”

Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured!  “The painfullest feeling,” writes he, “is that of your own Feebleness (Unkraft); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true misery.  And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done.  Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference!  A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible.  Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments.  Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.

“But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net-result of my Workings amounted as yet simply to—­Nothing.  How then could I believe in my Strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in?  Ever did this agitating, yet, as I now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain to me insoluble:  Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certain Worth, such even as the most have not; or art thou the completest Dullard of these modern times?  Alas, the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself; and how could I believe?  Had not my first, last Faith in myself, when even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all too cruelly belied?  The speculative Mystery of Life grew