Ah! there is the truth, both for me and for all others; it is that in secret I doubt as often of that oblivion that I so loudly affirm, as I do whether that God does not exist whose existence I so deny. Yet again, if God is but an imaginary being, and if immortality is but a dream, what does one risk to have thought the contrary? One would have lived fortified against the ills and crosses of this life by a thought that sweetens, even the terrors of death. One would not even feel the loss of that hope, since the hour of our disenchantment would be the one which should plunge us into the deep repose of oblivion! The lie, then, would have done that which the truth could not do; it would have given us happiness. If, on the contrary, immortality is not a vain chimera, but a reality, is it not a terrible responsibility to have shut one's heart to its evidence and to have misunderstood the sublime Author of all things? {86} Yes! in truth terrible; for in that momentous question, doubt is not to be permitted. On all human questions indifference follows uncertainty, but here indifference is itself a fault--one must deny or believe. But how am I to believe? When from earliest childhood you have had your aspirations broken or wounded under the repeated blows of contempt, and when you have been taught but to laugh at in others that faith whose absence you shall one day so bitterly deplore, how then to believe? Pray, he told me. Pray! Can I pray? Oh! happy are they who, arrived like me at that sad epoch in life when one drags painfully along the burden of one's worn-out days, have not to curse those who held them away from that source of strength and consolation! Yes, they are happy whom a pious mother taught from their cradle to bend the knees and join the hands in prayer! Gertrude also, she too prayed; and many a time have I felt myself touched in seeing her bend her head before the God of whom she asked for me the light of the faith. How many times have I not felt the desire to share her belief, and to kneel down like her and say: 'My dear Gertrude, there exists no place on this earth where we ought to be separated; there is not a thought, a belief, an affection, that ought not to be shared by us. Whatever may be the destiny that awaits us after the destruction of our being, whether it be oblivion or immortality, I wish to share it with you. Let your convictions be mine also, even as your life is mine. After having given me happiness in this world, show me the road that leads to that eternity I wish to believe in because you believe; make me to know that God whom I wish to love because you love him!' But alas! held by a false shame, I resisted that voice which spoke in the depth of my heart, and which, perhaps, was the voice of God: for is it not possible that such feelings as these are those by which Providence calls us to the truth? And I, how have I responded to that voice? Why, by rallying her on her belief. I