r old
Temples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rainproof,
crumble down; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes never
saw him?'

Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our
Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no
era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the
Servant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence. 'One
circumstance I note,' says he: 'after all the nameless woe that
Inquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love of
Truth, had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would
bate no jot of my allegiance to her. "Truth"! I cried, "though the
Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood! though a whole
celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy." In conduct it was
the same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous
Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me _This thou
shalt do_, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would I
have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in
spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss
Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had
brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me:
living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterly
bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing,
could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and
His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.'

Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual
destitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured!
'The painfullest feeling,' writes he, 'is that of your own Feebleness
(_Unkraft_); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true
misery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling,
save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between
vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a
difference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in
us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively
discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees
its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible
Precept, _Know thyself_; till it be translated into this partially
possible one, _Know what thou canst work-at_.

'But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been,