a thing eternal, and "beinggood" just simple obedience to

unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of

one's adultperception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of

partialunderstanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and

distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad

prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.

I recall phases of deep speculation,doubts and even prayers by

night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic

contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of

appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in

receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood

succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an

utter horror of death was replaced by thegrowing realisation of its

necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite

space, infinite time, entangled mymind; and moral distress for the

pain and suffering of bygone ages that made allthought of

reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now

irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these

broadening years did not so much get settled ascease to matter.

Life crowded me away from it.

I have confessedmyself a temerarious theologian, and in that

passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for

some permanentlysatisfyingTruth. That, too,ceased after a time

to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that

endures to this day, ofabsolutetranquillity, ofabsolute

confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which

must needs be the substratum of all things, may be.Feeling OF IT,

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