Without it he is more helpless than any drift-wood or wreckage on the great tides of the ocean.  They are cast hither and thither indeed; so may a man be by the chances of fortune.  But such adventures are purely external and of very small account.  A slave may be dragged through the streets in chains, and yet retain the quiet soul of a philosopher, as was well seen in the person of Epictetus.  A man may have every worldly prize in his possession, and stand absolute master of his personal fate, to all appearance, and yet he knows no peace, no certainty, because he is shaken within himself by every tide of thought that he touches on.  And these changing tides do not merely sweep the man bodily hither and thither like drift-wood on the water; that would be nothing.  They enter into the gate-ways of his soul, and wash over that soul and make it blind and blank and void of all permanent intelligence so that passing impressions affect it.

To make my meaning plainer I will use an illustration.  Take an author at his writing, a painter at his canvas, a composer listening to the melodies that dawn upon his glad imagination; let any one of these workers pass his daily hours by a wide window looking on a busy street.  The power of the animating life blinds sight and hearing alike, and the great traffic of the city goes by like nothing but a passing pageant.  But a man whose mind is empty, whose day is objectless, sitting at that same window, notes the passers-by and remembers the faces that chance to please or interest him.  So it is with the mind in its relation to eternal truth.  If it no longer transmits its fluctuations, its partial knowledge, its unreliable information to the soul, then in the inner place of peace already found when the first rule has been learned—­in that inner place there leaps into flame the light of actual knowledge.  Then the ears begin to hear.  Very dimly, very faintly at first.  And, indeed, so faint and tender are these first indications of the commencement of true actual life, that they are sometimes pushed aside as mere fancies, mere imaginings.

But before these are capable of becoming more than mere imaginings, the abyss of nothingness has to be faced in another form.  The utter silence which can only come by closing the ears to all transitory sounds comes as a more appalling horror than even the formless emptiness of space.  Our only mental conception of blank space is, I think, when reduced to its barest element of thought, that of black darkness.  This is a great physical terror to most persons, and when regarded as an eternal and unchangeable fact, must mean to the mind the idea of annihilation rather than anything else.  But it is the obliteration of one sense only; and the sound of a voice may come and bring comfort even in the profoundest darkness.  The disciple, having found his way into this blackness, which is the fearful abyss, must then so shut the gates of his soul that no comforter can enter there