despair; in contrite humility I cast myself down before my Creator, I felt myself undone, now that I perceived my devilish arrogance which had risen out of pure humility and love; I had experienced the most fearful apostacy from God, just at the moment when with all my faculties I felt myself nearer to him. "This moment in which my spirit became dizzy on the verge of insanity and frenzy, has since then ever seemed to me the most terrible one in my life. I now understood myself and human nature, and also the danger of enthusiastic raptures of love. I had then indeed myself trodden the bridge over which all enthusiasts have passed, the narrow path (ever shining brightly, though hell lies beneath it) between virtue and vice, between wisdom and presumption, which leads from love and kindliness to hatred and murder, and I had now learned what an unholy spirit had moved the Anabaptists, and Adamites, and perhaps now glows and rages in many a heart among the rebels. Oh! my son, man is a most frail and pitiable being, the more is lent to him, the more has he to answer for, the brighter the spirit of love glows within him, the darker burns his reprobation; his gifts granted to him from heaven, may become his dire enemies, there is no one either that stands so fast, but that he may also fall. My legends had already taught me that, but I was doomed to feel it first in this fatal downfall." "Therefore still hell and devil?" cried Edmond after a long pause. "However mildly you spoke and sentenced at first, the priestly condemnation follows in the end. Oh thou unfortunate Cavalier and Marion! and ye unhappy children, on whose lisping tongues Satan himself laid the name of the Lord, and the awaking to repentance." "What then shall we call that?" said the old man mildly, "which works directly against God? We require not certainly that fearful figure, which perversity has imagined, in order to represent him personally; we need not indeed ascribe to him those tremendous attributes, which the miracle-seeking has invented, fabulously enough, but so much the worse for us, the weaker, the more powerless he in himself is: how feeble are we then to permit ourselves to be so ignominously overcome by this shadow, this delusion, this inefficiency, this nothingness? How our priests may censure these suggestions and represent them as devilish I know not, but it suffices for me, that I have experienced in myself, that such a feeling of all our energies may exist in us in divine love, which then does not proceed from God, but from his despicable adversary, and of which we must beware, because we, the image of God, through our own demerits are, as it were, only shadows of shadows."