Whilst he accepted these trials as punitive messages and warnings, his scarified soul became receptive to Roman Catholic influences. His wife's mother and aunt were Catholics; his child had been brought up in that faith. He had seen human souls sanctified by a catholic mysticism which bore humility and fortitude. The symbols, the certainty, the rich imagery of the Catholic Church had appealed to him, when the poverty of philosophical speculation had made him despair of human intelligence. He had bought a rosary in Paris because it was beautiful, and because "the evil ones were afraid of the cross." One day an image of the Madonna, carried through the streets of Paris on a cart following a hearse, had strangely attracted him. Like Tasso's vision of the Virgin in the midst of his feverish torment by noises and tinkling bells, Strindberg's gaze on the image of all-merciful motherhood brought comfort. At first attracted to Catholic prayers, and to the ideal of the monastic life by the instinct which makes the man in pain seek an anodyne, he was gradually led to a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. Swedenborg continued to reveal the mysteries of symbols and correspondences to him; in the scenery around the Austrian village he found, not only an exact replica of a Swedenborgian hell, but the original of a landscape which had precipitated itself in the zinc bath used in his gold-making experiments in Paris. [Illustration: August Strindberg--1902] [Illustration: August Strindberg--1908--In his home in Stockholm. Photo by A. Blomberg, Stockholm] Strindberg's early blasphemies and atheism were the fruits of an inverted religiosity which left him no peace. His devotional mood could find no bridge of union with his scientific mood. The search for knowledge and the search for God led to different goals. Whilst his brain struggled for breadth, his heart cried for the narrow depth of dogma and creed. His researches into occultism and the philosophy of religions, his acquaintance with theosophy did not reconcile his religion with his science. The sense of sin, of having sought unlawful knowledge haunted him in his studies of black magic and Satanism, and in the exercise of the occult powers of which he was conscious. Though Strindberg had not read Huysmans' _Là-Bas_ and _En Route_ when he wrote _Inferno_, there is a strong resemblance between the books and the religious evolution of the authors.