iliar so long as books are read upon the earth--"The Everlasting No,"
"Centre of Indifference" and "The Everlasting Yea."

In "The Everlasting No" we watch the work of negation upon the soul of
man. His life has capitulated to the Spirit that denies, and the
unbelief is as bitter as it is hopeless. "Doubt had darkened into
Unbelief; shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have
the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." "Is there no God, then; but at
best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the
outside of his Universe, and _seeing_ it go? Has the word Duty no
meaning?"

"Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done,
shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and
receive no Answer but an Echo." Faith, indeed, lies dormant but alive
beneath the doubt. But in the meantime the man's own weakness paralyses
action; and, while this paralysis lasts, all faith appears to have
departed. He has ceased to believe in himself, and to believe in his
friends. "The very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as
believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose,
of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable
Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind men limb
from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!"

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 b