I was singularly disposed to reflect on everything that came to my notice, to give everything a mental and moral significance; I treated events as pearls in a necklace which I tried to string together.

It struck me that there was something significant about the arrival of these books at this time.  I devoured them with a bitterness and a sadness born of despair.  “Yes, you are right,” I said to myself, “you alone possess the secret of life, you alone dare to say that nothing is true and real but debauchery, hypocrisy, and corruption.  Be my friends, throw on the wound in my soul your corrosive poisons, teach me to believe in you.”

While buried in these shadows, I allowed my favorite poets and text-books to accumulate dust.  I even ground them under my feet in excess of wrath.  “You wretched dreamers!” I said to them; “you who teach me only suffering, miserable shufflers of words, charlatans, if you know the truth, fools, if you speak in good faith, liars in either case, who make fairy-tales of the woes of the human heart.  I will burn the last one of you!”

Then tears came to my aid and I perceived that there was nothing real but my grief.  “Very well,” I cried, in my delirium, “tell me, good and bad genii, counselors for good or evil, tell me what to do!  Choose an arbiter and let him speak.”

I seized an old Bible which lay on my table, and read the first passage that caught my eye.

“Reply to me, thou book of God!” I said, “what word hast thou for me?” My eye fell on this passage in Ecclesiastes, Chapter IX: 

For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this, that the righteous and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God; no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them.

All things come alike to all:  there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not:  as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all:  yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

When I read these words I was astounded; I did not know that there was such a sentiment in the Bible.  “And thou, too, as all others, thou book of hope!”

What do the astronomers think when they predict, at a given hour and place, the passage of a comet, that most eccentric of celestial travellers?  What do the naturalists think when they reveal the myriad forms of life concealed in a drop of water?  Do they think they have invented what they see and that their lenses and microscopes make the law of nature?  What did the first law-giver think when, seeking for the corner-stone in the social edifice, angered doubtless