“Ha, ha!” he said gently, “I hope you’ll excuse this, I must admit, very odd intrusion; but I knew I should find you here, and could not resist the opportunity of raising the window just for a moment, to look in upon a little family picture, and say a word to yourself.  I understand that you are troubled, because for some cause you cannot say your prayers—­because what you call your ‘faith’ is, so to speak, dead and gone, and also because what you consider bad thoughts are constantly recurring to your mind.  Now, all that is very silly.  If it is really impossible for you to believe and to pray, what are you to infer from that?  It is perfectly plain your Christian system can’t be a true one—­faith and prayer it everywhere represents as the conditions of grace, acceptance, and salvation; and yet your Creator will not permit you either to believe or pray.  The Christian system is, forsooth, a free gift, and yet he who formed you and it, makes it absolutely impossible for you to accept it. Is it, I ask you, from your own experience—­is it a free gift?  And if your own experience, in which you can’t be mistaken, gives its pretensions the lie, why, in the name of common sense, will you persist in believing it?  I say it is downright blasphemy to think it has emanated from the Good Spirit—­assuming that there is one.  It tells you that you must be tormented hereafter in a way only to be made intelligible by the image of eternal fires—­pretty strong, we must all allow—­unless you comply with certain conditions, which it pretends are so easy that it is a positive pleasure to embrace and perform them; and yet, for the life of you, you can’t—­physically can’t—­do either.  Is this truth and mercy?—­or is it swindling and cruelty?  Is it the part of the Redeemer, or that of the tyrant, deceiver, and tormentor?”

Up to that moment, my wife had sate breathless and motionless, listening, in the catalepsy of nightmare, to a sort of echo of the vile and impious reasoning which had haunted her for so long.  At the last words of the sentence his voice became harsh and thrilling; and his whole manner bespoke a sort of crouching and terrific hatred, the like of which she could not have conceived.

Whatever may have been the cause, she was on a sudden disenchanted.  She started to her feet; and, freezing with horror though she was, in a shrill cry of agony commanded him, in the name of God, to depart from her.  His whole frame seemed to darken; he drew back silently; the curtains dropped into their places, the window was let down again as stealthily as it had just been raised; and my wife found herself alone in the chamber with our little child, who had been startled from her sleep by her mother’s cry of anguish, and with the fearful words, “tempter,” “destroyer,” “devil,” still ringing in her ears, was weeping bitterly, and holding her terrified mother’s hand.