will still be _you_. You will still be the same being, but deprived of
those outward stays and reliefs and solaces, which, such as they are, you
now enjoy. You will be yourself, shut up in yourself. I have heard that
people go mad at length when placed in solitary confinement. If, then, on
passing hence, you are cut off from what you had here, and have only the
company of yourself, I think your burden will be, so far, greater, not
less than it is now.

"Suppose, for instance, you had still your love of conversing, and could
not converse; your love of the poets of your race, and no means of
recalling them; your love of music, and no instrument to play upon; your
love of knowledge, and nothing to learn; your desire of sympathy, and no
one to love: would not that be still greater misery?

"Let me proceed a step further: supposing you were among those whom you
actually did _not_ love; supposing you did _not_ like them, nor their
occupations, and could not understand their aims; suppose there be, as
Christians say, one Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no
taste for thinking of Him, and no interest in what He was and what He did;
and supposing you found that there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom
you did not love and whom you wished away: would you not be still more
wretched?

"And if this went on for ever, would you not be in great inexpressible
pain for ever?

"Assuming then, first, that the soul always needs external objects to rest
upon; next, that it has no prospect of any such when it leaves this
visible scene; and thirdly, that the hunger and thirst, the gnawing of the
heart, where it occurs, is as keen and piercing as a flame; it will follow
there is nothing irrational in the notion of an eternal Tartarus."

"I cannot answer you, sir," said Callista, "but I do not believe the dogma
on that account a whit the more. My mind revolts from the notion. There
_must_ be some way out of it."

"If, on the other hand," continued Caecilius, not noticing her
interruption, "if all your thoughts go one way; if you have needs,
desires, aims, aspirations, all of which demand an Object, and imply, by
their very existence, that such an Object does exist also; and if nothing
here does satisfy them, and if there be a message which professes to come
from that Object, of whom you already have the presentiment, and to teach
you about Him, and to bring the remedy you crave; and if those who try
that remedy say with