This is the way in which I had repeatedly striven to silence my conscience, and it is but one instance of the way in which many others on this earth are now striving to silence theirs. "For God's sake," I would say to them, "beware!" Such hardening of the heart against the Holy Spirit, such God-murdering (for it _is_ the wish to kill God, and to silence His voice for ever) is the one unpardonable sin which is a thousand-fold more awful in its consequences than is the crime which it seeks to conceal. It was the foulest stain on the soul of him who hung by the dying Saviour, and it is, I believe at this moment, the one and only thing which still keeps Hell Hell, and Satan Satan. Must I write further of the torture-throes of that awful moment, when I first saw my sin in its true light? God only knows how even now I shudder and shrink at the mere thought of it; but I have told you of my crime, and it is right that I should speak also of my punishment. I remember that when the realization of what I was, and what I had done, was first borne in upon me, I fell to the ground and writhed and shrieked in agony. The tortures of a material hell,--of a thousand material hells,--I would have endured with joyfulness could such torture have drowned for one moment the thought-anguish that tore me. Nay, mere physical suffering--physical suffering meted out to me as punishment, and in which, though it were powerless to expiate, I could at least participate by enduring--I would have welcomed with delirious gladness, but of such relief or diversion of thought there was none. From the mere mention of annihilation--the personal annihilation of soul and body, of thought and sensation--I had ever shrunk with abject loathing and dread; but to annihilation, had it been then within my reach, I would have fought my way through a thousand devils. But in hell there is no escape through annihilation; suicide, the last refuge of tyrannous and cowardly despair, is of none avail, "And death once dead there's no more dying then." What had to be endured I found _must_ be endured, and that unto the uttermost, for in all horrid hell there was no nook or cranny into which I could creep to hide myself from the hideous spectres of the past. I remember that I rose up in my despair, and stretching vain hands to the impotent heavens, shrieked out as only one can shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. I fell to the ground and writhed and foamed in convulsive and bloody agony. I dug my cruel nails deep into my burning eyeballs, and tearing those eyeballs from their tender sockets, flung them bleeding from me; but not thus could I blind myself to the sights of hell, nor could mere physical pain wipe out from my brain the picture of the ruin I had wrought. And then--but no, I am sick, I am ill, I am fainting; I cannot, I cannot write more. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VII. _SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT._