Look at the book, which Halbert’s trembling hand holds open. Look at this little pile laid by themselves in one corner of the room, the gift every one of them of the friend who sits sneering beside him, the Apostle of so-called spiritualism, but in reality, rank materialism, and infidelity, and you will see good cause for the internal struggle, which chases the boiling blood through his youthful veins, and moistens his lofty brow with drops of anguish. The tempter has wrought long and warily; Halbert’s mind has been besieged in regular form; mines have been sprung, batteries silenced, bastions destroyed--at least, to Halbert’s apprehension, rendered no longer tenable; point by point has he surrendered, stone by stone the walls of the citadel have been undermined, and the overthrowal is complete. Halbert Melville is an unbeliever, an infidel, for the time. Alas! that fair and beauteous structure, one short twelvemonth since so grand, so imposing, so seeming strong and impregnable, lies now a heap of ruins. No worse sight did ever captured fortress offer, after shot and shell, mine and counter-mine, storm and rapine had done their worst, than this, that that noble enthusiastic mind should become so shattered and confused and ruinous. There is a pause in the conversation. Halbert has shut his book, and is bending over it in silence. Oh, that some ray of light may penetrate his soul, transfix these subtle sophisms, and win him back to truth and right again; for what has he instead of truth and right? only dead negations and privations; a series of Noes--no God, no Saviour, no Devil even, though they are his children; no immortality, no hereafter--a perfect wilderness of Noes. But his tempter sees the danger. “Come, Melville,” he says rising, “you have been studying too long to-day; come man, you are not a boy to become melancholy, because you have found out at last, what I could have told you long ago, that these nonsensical dreams and figments, that puzzled you a month or two since, are but bubbles and absurdities after all--marvellously coherent we must confess in some things, and very poetical and pretty in others--but so very irrational that they most surely are far beneath the consideration of men in these days of progress and enlightenment. Come, you must go with me to-night, I have some friends to sup with me, to whom I would like to introduce you. See, here is your hat; put away Gregg, and Newman, just now, the Nemesis can stand till another time--by-the-by, what a struggle that fellow must have had, before he got to light. Come away.”