He is saved from suicide simply by the after-shine of Christianity.  The religion of his fathers lingers, no longer as a creed, but as a powerful set of associations and emotions.  It is a small thing to cling to amid the wrack of a man’s universe; yet it holds until the appearance of a new phase in which he is to find escape from the prison-house.  He has begun to realise that fear—­a nameless fear of he knows not what—­has taken hold upon him.  “I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous.”  Fear affects men in widely different ways.  We have seen how this same vague “sense of enemies” obsessed the youthful spirit of Marius the Epicurean, until it cleared itself eventually into the conscience of a Christian man.  But Teufelsdroeckh is prouder and more violent of spirit than the sedate and patrician Roman, and he leaps at the throat of fear in a wild defiance.  “What art thou afraid of?  Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped!  What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?  Death?  Well, Death:  and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee!  Hast thou not a Heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee?  Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!”

This is no permanent or stable resting-place, but it is the beginning of much.  It is the assertion of self in indignation and wild defiance, instead of the former misery of a man merely haunted by himself.  This is that “Baphometic Fire-baptism” or new-birth of spiritual awakening, which is the beginning of true manhood.  The Everlasting No had said:  “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s); to which my whole Me now made answer:  I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!”

The immediate result of this awakening is told in “Centre of Indifference”—­i.e., indifference to oneself, one’s own feelings, and even to fate.  It is the transition from subjective to objective interests, from eating one’s own heart out to a sense of the wide and living world by which one is surrounded.  It is the same process which, just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in Paracelsus and Sordello.  Once more Teufelsdroeckh travels, but this time how differently!  Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of himself, he sees the world full of vital interests—­cities of men, tilled fields, books, battlefields.  The great questions of the world—­the true meanings alike of peace and war—­claim his interest.  The great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his astonished eyes.  “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and pertinently enough note what is passing there.”  He has reached—­strangely enough through self-assertion—­the centre of indifference to self, and of interest in other people and things.  And the supreme lesson of it all is the value of efficiency.  Napoleon “was a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached, through the cannon’s throat, that great doctrine, La carriere ouverte aux talens (the tools to him that can handle them).”