For a time, while I was in good health, while I possessed and wielded a more than human power, and had not yet exhausted the world in which I did believe, or despaired of recasting it after my own image, I got along without much difficulty; but when I no longer saw any object in life, when there was from my own point of view no longer any work for me to do, and I was thrown back on my own failing godship, and left to devour my own heart, I became wretched, more wretched than I can express. The blow which prostrated me, and the disease which it developed, and brought me to handgrips with Death, changed the current of my thoughts, but unhappily only to render them for the time still more painful. “You know, O Socrates,” says Cephalus in Plato’s _Republic_, “that when a man thinks that he is drawing near to death, certain things, as to which he had previously been very tranquil, awaken in his bosom anxiety and alarm. What has been told him of hell and the punishment of the wicked, the stories at which he had formerly laughed or mocked, now fill his soul with trouble. He fears that they may prove true. Enfeebled by age, or brought nearer to the frightful abodes, he seems to perceive them with greater clearness and force, and is therefore disturbed by doubts and apprehensions. He reviews his past life, and seeks what evil he may have done. If he finds, on examination, that his life has been iniquitous, he awakes often in the night, agitated and shuddering, as a child, with sudden terrors, trembles and lives in fearful expectation;” or, as I may add with St. Paul, “a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.” As I found myself on my dying bed, things began to wear to me a very different aspect from what they did when I was in the heyday of youth, in the full flow of my animal spirits, or filled with the vain and delusive hope of subjecting all nature to my will. The lessons which I had heard in my childhood, and which I had ridiculed or forgotten, came back with startling power; and in my lonely reflections I was forced to ask what, if that which they tell us of death and judgment, of heaven and hell, the rewards of the good and the punishment of the wicked, should turn out to be true?