But fear now for the first time took possession of him, and he realised—­if not in all its truth, at least in part—­that his love of God had only taken the form of a gratification of the senses, a sensuality higher but as intense as those which he so much reproved.  Fear smouldered in his very entrails, and doubt fumed and went out like steam—­long lines and falling shadows and slowly dispersing clouds.  His life had been but a sin, an abomination, and the fairest places darkened as the examination of conscience proceeded.  His thought whirled in dreadful night, soul-torturing contradictions came suddenly under his eyes, like images in a night-mare; and in horror and despair, as a woman rising from a bed of small-pox drops the mirror after the first glance, and shrinks from destroying the fair remembrance of her face by pursuing the traces of the disease through every feature, he hid his face in his hands and called for forgiveness—­for escape from the endless record of his conscience.  With staring eyes and contracted brows he saw the flames which await him who blasphemes.  To the verge of those flames he had drifted.  If God in His infinite mercy had not withheld him?...  He pictured himself lost in fires and furies.  Then looking up he saw the face of Christ, grown pitiless in final time—­Christ standing immutable amid His white million of youths....

And the worthlessness and the abjectness of earthly life struck him with awful and all-convincing power, and this vision of the worthlessness of existence was clearer than any previous vision.  He paused.  There was but one conclusion ... it looked down upon him like a star—­he would become a priest.  All darkness, all madness, all fear faded, and with sure and certain breath he breathed happiness; the sense of consecration nestled in its heart, and its light shone upon his face.

There was nothing in the past, but there is the sweetness of meditation in the present, and in the future there is God.  Like a fountain flowing amid a summer of leaves and song, the sweet hours came with quiet and melodious murmur.  In the great arm-chair of his ancestors he sits thin and tall.  Thin and tall.  The great flames decorate the darkness, and the twilight sheds upon the rose curtains, walking birds and falling petals.  But his thoughts are dreaming through long aisle and solemn arch, clouds of incense and painted panes....  The palms rise in great curls like the sky; and amid the opulence of gold vestments, the whiteness of the choir, the Latin terminations and the long abstinences, the holy oil comes like a kiss that never dies ... and in full glory of symbol and chant, the very savour of God descends upon him ... and then he awakes, surprised to find such dreams out of sleep.