“You see, my dear sir, to search in a symbolical sense, to think that all of life is but a searching, that is not what I complain of, that is not what you should sigh about. The ethical goes without saying. An honest fellow will search and yearn and never complain, but be happy in the midst of this misery of an ever-rising and never-terminating line. That is our upper storey. But what we have to take along with it, the vexation and bother we must put up with in the lower storey of life, that is what I am talking of. There, for instance, is the necessity of searching, which makes you mad, nervous, insane. And, what is more, it strands you in Atheism. The dear God sitting on high and counting the hairs on our head, who sees me searching for my spectacles for hours at a time, he sees the spectacles too, knows just where they are,--can you bear it, the thought of how he must laugh? A kind, omnipotent Being! Do you think such a one would permit the curse of colds in your head? Alas, we are born to search, to undo knots, to sneeze and cough and spit! Man, with a proud world within his arched brows, with his beaming eyes, his spirit dipping into the depth and breadth of infinitude, with his soul rising on silver wings into the heavens, with his imagination pouring streams of golden fire over hill and vale and transforming the image of mortality to God, with his will, the flashing sword within his hand to adjust, to judge, to conquer, with pious patience to plant, to cherish, and watch over the tree of life that it may grow and flourish and bear heavenly fruit of noble culture, Man with the angelic image of the divine and beautiful within his longing, yearning bosom,--yes, this same Man, changed to a mollusc, his throat a grating-iron, a nest of devils, tickling the larynx with finest needles for nights and nights, his eyes dim, his brain heavy, dull, perturbed, his nerves poisoned, and, with all that, not considered ill; and you say that God----!” Here our denier of the existence of God was seized with so deplorable a fit of sneezing and coughing that I repressed a remark I had upon my tongue. * * * * *