'faith' is, so to speak, dead and
gone, and also because what _you_ consider bad thoughts are constantly
recurring to your mind. Now, all that is very silly. If it is really
impossible for you to believe and to pray, what are you to infer from
that? It is perfectly plain your Christian system can't be a true
one--faith and _prayer_ it everywhere represents as the conditions of
grace, acceptance, and salvation; and yet your Creator will not _permit_
you either to believe or pray. The Christian system is, forsooth, a
_free_ gift, and yet he who formed _you_ and _it_, makes it absolutely
impossible for you to accept it. _Is_ it, I ask you, from your own
experience--is it a free gift? And if your own experience, in which you
can't be mistaken, gives its pretensions the lie, why, in the name of
common sense, will you persist in believing it? I say it is downright
blasphemy to think it has emanated from the Good Spirit--assuming that
there is one. It tells you that you must be tormented hereafter in a way
only to be made intelligible by the image of eternal fires--pretty
strong, we must all allow--unless you comply with certain conditions,
which it pretends are so easy that it is a positive pleasure to embrace
and perform them; and yet, for the life of you, you can't--physically
_can't_--do either. Is this truth and mercy?--or is it swindling and
cruelty? Is it the part of the Redeemer, or that of the tyrant, deceiver,
and tormentor?"

Up to that moment, my wife had sate breathless and motionless, listening,
in the catalepsy of nightmare, to a sort of echo of the vile and impious
reasoning which had haunted her for so long. At the last words of the
sentence his voice became harsh and thrilling; and his whole manner
bespoke a sort of crouching and terrific hatred, the like of which she
could not have conceived.

Whatever may have been the cause, she was on a sudden disenchanted. She
started to her feet; and, freezing with horror though she was, in a
shrill cry of agony commanded him, in the name of God, to depart from
her. His whole frame seemed to darken; he drew back silently; the
curtains dropped into their places, the window was let down again as
stealthily as it had just been raised; and my wife found herself alone in
the chamber with our little child, who had been startled from her sleep
by her mother's cry of anguish, and with the fearful words, "tempter,"
"destroyer," "devil," still ringing in her ears, was weeping bi