There had been a time when he read with freshened hope the promises of forgiveness in that strange New Testament.  Once he had even believed that these might save him; that he was again numbered with the elect.  But when this belief had grown firm, so that he could seem to rest his weight upon it, he felt it fall away to nothing under him, and the truth he had divined that day in the desert was again bared before him.  He saw that how many times soever God might forgive the sins of a man, it would avail that man nothing unless he could forgive himself.  He knew at last that in his own soul was fixed a gauge of right, unbending and implacable when wrong had been done, waiting to be reckoned with at the very last even though the great God should condone his sin.  It seemed to him that, however surely his endowments took him through the gates of the Kingdom, with whatsoever power they raised him to dominion; even though he came into the Father’s presence and sat a throne of his own by the side of Joseph and Brigham, that there would still ring in his ears the cries of those who had been murdered at the priesthood’s command; that there would leap before his eyes fountains of blood from the breasts of living women who knelt and clung to the knees of their slayers—­to the knees of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; that he would see two spots of white in the dim light of a morning where the two little girls lay who had been sent for water; that he would see the two boys taken out to the desert, one to die at once, the other to wander to a slower death; that before his sinful eyes would come the dying face of the woman who had loved him and lost her soul rather than betray him.  He knew that, even in celestial realms exalted beyond the highest visions of their priesthood, his soul would still burn in this fire that he could not extinguish within his own breast.  He knew that he carried hell as an inseparable part of himself, and that the forgiveness of no other power could avail him.  He no longer feared God, but himself alone.

From this fire of his own building it seemed to him that he could obtain surcease only by reducing the self within him.  As surely as he let it feel a want, all the torture came back upon him.  When his pride lifted up its head, when he desired any satisfaction for himself, when he was tempted for a moment to lay down his cross, the cries came back, the sea of blood surged before him, and close behind came the shapes that crawled or moved furtively, ever about to spring in front and turn upon him.  Small wonder, then, that his shoulders bent beneath unseen burdens, that his air was of one who suffered for all the world, and that they called him “the little man of sorrows.”