with an aspect whose
character I felt rather than saw, he said--

"And so you mean to be a Christian, after all! Now just reflect how very
absurdly you are choosing. Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who
may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense,
study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a
plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply _professors_ of
his theory. Why don't you _read_ the Bible, you miserable, puling
poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, and
learn out of the mouth of the founder of Christianity, that there is one
sin for which there is _no_ forgiveness--blasphemy against the Holy
Ghost, hey?--and that sin I myself have heard you commit by the hour--in
my presence--in my room. I have heard you commit it in our free
discussions a dozen times. The Bible seals against you the lips of mercy.
If _it_ be true, you are this moment as irrevocably damned as if you had
died with those blasphemies on your lips."

Having thus spoken, he glided into the house. I followed slowly.

His words rang in my ears--I was stunned. What he had said I feared might
be true. Giant despair felled me to the earth. He had recalled, and
lighted up with a glare from the pit, remembrances with which I knew not
how to cope. It was true I had spoken with daring impiety of subjects
whose sacredness I now began to appreciate. With trembling hands I opened
the Bible. I read and re-read the mysterious doom recorded by the
Redeemer himself against blasphemers of the Holy Ghost--monsters set
apart from the human race, and damned and dead, even while they live and
walk upon the earth. I groaned--I wept. Henceforward the Bible, I
thought, must be to me a dreadful record of despair. I dared not read it.

I will not weary you with all my mental agonies. My dear little wife did
something toward relieving my mind, but it was reserved for the friend,
to whose heavenly society I owed so much, to tranquillise it once more.
He talked this time to me longer, and even more earnestly than before. I
soon encountered him again. He expounded to me the ways of Providence,
and showed me how needful sorrow was for every servant of God. How mercy
was disguised in tribulation, and our best happiness came to us, like our
children, in tears and wailing. He showed me that trials were sent to
call us up, with a voice of preternatural power, from the mortal apathy
of sin a