I had not helped others.  My life for thirty years had been that of a mere parasite.  I had been contented to remain ignorant of the reason why I lived at all.

There is a supreme will in the universe.  Some one makes the universal life his secret care.  To know what that supreme will is, we must obey it implicitly.  No reproaches against their masters come from the simple workers who do just what is required of them, though we are in the habit of regarding them as brutes.  We, on the contrary, who think ourselves wise, consume the goods of our master while we do nothing willingly that he prescribes.  We think that it would be stupid for us to do so.

What does such conduct imply?  Simply that our master is stupid, or that we have no master.

V.—­Feeling Versus Reason

Thus I was led at last to the conclusion that knowledge based on reason is fallacious, and that the knowledge of truth can be secured only by living.  I had come to feel that I must live a real, not a parasitical life, and that the meaning of life could be perceived only by observation of the combined lives of the great human community.

The feelings of my mind during all these experiences and observations were mingled with a heart-torment which I can only describe as a searching after God.  This search was a feeling rather than a course of reasoning.  For it came from my heart, and was actually opposed to my way of thinking.  Kant had shown the impossibility of proving the existence of God, yet I still hoped to find Him, and I still addressed Him in prayer.  Yet I did not find Him whom I sought.

At times I contended against the reasoning of Kant and Schopenhauer, and argued that causation is not in the same category with thought and space and time.  I argued that if I existed, there was a cause of my being, and that cause was the cause of all causes.  Then I pondered the idea that the cause of all things is what is called God, and with all my powers I strove to attain a sense of the presence of this cause.

Directly I became conscious of a power over me I felt a possibility of living.  Then I asked myself what was this cause, and what was my relation to what I called God?  Simply the old familiar answer occurred to me, that God is the creator, the giver of all.  Yet I was dissatisfied and fearful, and the more I prayed, the more convinced I was that I was not heard.  In my despair I cried aloud for mercy, but no one had mercy on me, and I felt as if life stagnated within me.

Yet the conviction kept recurring that I must have appeared in this world with some motive on the part of some one who had sent me into it.  If I had been sent here, who sent me?  I had not been like a fledgling flung out of a nest to perish.  Some one had cared for me, had loved me.  Who was it?  Again came the same answer, God.  He knew and saw my fear, my despair, and so I passed from the consideration of the existence of God, which was proved, on to that of our relation towards him as our Redeemer through His Son.  But I felt this to be a thing apart from me and from the world, and this God vanished like melting ice from my eyes.  Again I was left in despair.  I felt there was nothing left but to put an end to my life; yet I knew that I should never do this.