ovements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with
another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of
a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the
movement of my ideas--in fact, it was the direct contrary of that
movement--but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread
that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these
things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated
by the hope of finding the assistance of some one."[80]

[80] My extracts are from the French translation by "Zonia." In
abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.

Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from
this idea of God, led to Tolstoy's recovery, I will say nothing in this
lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need
interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with
ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values
may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear
so ghastly a mockery.

When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and
the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when
any does come--and often enough it fails to return in an acute form,
though its form is sometimes very acute--is not the simple, ignorance
of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as
one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block
and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good.
The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural
health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a
second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy
before.

We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in
literature in John Bunyan's autobiography. Tolstoy's preoccupations
were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general
was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan's troubles were over the
condition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of the
psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree,
beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal
automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of
Scripture which, sometimes dam