“Then suddenly came a whisper—­not to my ear—­I heard it far away, but whether in some distant cave of thought, away beyond the flaming walls of the universe, or in some forgotten dungeon-corner of my own heart, I could not tell.  ‘O man,’ it said, ’what a being, what a life is thine!  See all these souls, these fires of life, regarding and loving thee!  It is in the glory of thy love their faces shine.  Their hearts receive it, and send it back in joy.  Seest thou not all their eyes fixed upon thine?  Seest thou not the light come and go upon their faces, as the pulses of thy heart flow and ebb?  See, now they flash, and now they fade!  Blessed art thou, O man, as none else in the universe of God is blessed!’

“It was, or seemed, only a voice.  But therewith, horrible to tell, the glow of another fire arose in me—­an orange and red fire, and it went out from me, and withered all the faces, and the next moment there was darkness—­all was black as night.  But my being was still awake—­only if then there was bliss, now was there the absolute blackness of darkness, the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever.  The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness.  It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—­a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry:  my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—­a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame that I might know there was a God.  Somehow I only remembered God as a word, however; I knew nothing of my whence or whither.  One time there might have been a God, but there was none now:  if there ever was one, He must be dead.  Certainly there was no God to love—­for if there was a God, how could the creature whose very essence was to him an evil, love the Creator of him?  I had the word love, and I could reason about it in my mind, but I could not call up the memory of what the feeling of it was like.  The blackness grew and grew.  I hated life fiercely.  I hated the very possibility of a God who had created me a blot, a blackness.  With that I felt blackness begin to go out from me, as the light had gone before—­not that I remembered the light; I had forgotten all about it, and remembered it only after I awoke.  Then came the words of the Lord to me:  ’If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ And I knew what was coming:  oh, horror! in a moment more I should see the faces of those I had once loved, dark with the blackness that went out from my very existence; then I should hate them, and my being would then be a hell to which the hell I now was would be a heaven!  There was just grace enough left in me for the hideousness of the terror to wake me.  I was cold as if I had been dipped in a well.  But oh, how I thanked God that I was what I am, and might yet hope after what I may be!”