A few days after, he came in contact with some.  Their fervour awakened some faint interest in him, and now, as weary of playing at Mephistopheles as he was of playing at Faust, he followed the occupation of his new friends.  But his attempts at reformation were vain, they wore out the soul, and left it only more hopeless than before; and he remembered John Norton’s words, that faith is a gift from God which we must cherish, or He will take it from us utterly; and sighing, Mike recognized the great truth underlying a primitive mode of expression.  He had drifted too far into the salt sea of unfaith and cynicism, ever to gain again the fair if illusive shores of aspiration—­maybe illusive, but no more illusive than the cruel sea that swung him like a wreck in its current, feeding upon him as the sea feeds.  Nor could he make surrender of his passion of life, saying—­

“I see into the heart of things, I know the truth, and in the calm possession of knowledge am able to divest myself of my wretched individuality, and so free myself of all evils, seeking in absorption, rather than by violent ends, to rid myself of consciousness.”

But this, the religion of the truly wise, born in the sublime East, could find no roothold in Mike Fletcher—­that type and epitome of Western grossness and lust of life.  Religions being a synthesis of moral aspirations, developed through centuries, are mischievous and untrue except in the circumstances and climates in which they have grown up, and native races are decimated equally by the importation of a religion or a disease.  True it is that Christianity was a product of the East, but it was an accidental and inferior offshoot from the original religion of the race, not adapted to their needs, and fitted only for exportation.  And now, tainted and poisoned by a thousand years of habitation in the West, Christianity returns to the East, virulent and baneful as small-pox, a distinctly demoralizing influence, having power only to change excellent Buddhists into prostitutes and thieves.  And in such a way, according to the same laws, Mike had observed, since he had adopted pessimism, certain unmistakable signs in himself of moral degeneracy.

He had now exhausted all Nature’s remedies, save one—­Drink, and he could not drink.  Drink has often rescued men, in straits of mental prostration, from the charcoal-pan, the pistol, and the river.  But Mike could not drink, and Nature sought in vain to re-adjust again, and balance anew, forces which seemed now irretrievably disarranged.  All the old agencies were exhausted, and the new force, which chance, co-operating with natural disposition, had introduced, was dominant in him.  Against it women were now powerless, and he turned aside from offered love.