But detached from the world by experience of its hollowness, and by my mortal illness, I became less disposed to resist the grace of God, and in some measure prepared to listen with candor to Mr. Merton’s reasoning. I very soon became convinced that I had really fallen into the error of calling good evil, and evil good. I had really substituted Satan for God, and in doing so had committed the precise error the Christian clergy had always laid to my charge. I saw that they had been right in advocating what I called, with Priscilla, the system of repression, and I wrong in advocating the contrary system. I saw that, as a reasonable man, I must abandon the whole order of ideas which I had cherished in my Satanic pride and lust, and embrace that order of ideas which I had hitherto rejected as false and mischievous. There was no room for compromise. I must say decidedly either “Good Lord” or “Good Devil,” and as I could no longer say the latter, I must say the former. Many people, knowing my order of thinking when I was well and in the world, may blame a change so complete and so universal; but only because they are people of confused, incomplete, and disjointed thought, whose views are always dim, obscure, and incoherent, and who can never understand the operations of a mind that reduces all its views to their fundamental principle, to a clear, well-defined, and self-coherent whole, so that any change at all must be change of principle, and involve an entire change of system. Philosophical and logical minds may err, but in their premises, not in their conclusions from them. No question with them is ever a question of detail, and none ever turns on a collateral issue. If they start from infidel premises, they will come to the conclusion that Satan is God, and adjust their theory of the universe accordingly. If they assume, as their point of departure, that liberty is in the absence of all restraint, and that liberty in this sense is good, they must come to the conclusion so earnestly insisted upon by my instructress Priscilla, and of course reject that whole order of ideas which asserts the need of law, the utility of government, or the necessity of restraint. That, in doing so, they go against common sense, they are as well aware as are their opponents; but that fact cannot move them, for the legitimate conclusion from it, if their premises are right, is that so-called common sense is wrong, and needs to be corrected. If the common opinions, doctrines, or judgments of mankind are against them, they are indemnified by finding a common feeling, a secret but real feeling, of all men in their favor; for the very fact that restraint is necessary, proves that perverse nature demands, when left to itself, universal liberty or unbounded license. They have but to adopt the doctrine of the innate purity and sanctity of nature, to call this natural feeling a pure and holy instinct, and bid us follow nature, in order to make out their complete logical