He could truthfully say that because he had studied people and had seen through them. He had seen nothing but liars and thieves, wretched fools, misers, and the meanly ambitious. He had seen the dogs cringe and creep when they wanted to rise, cringe before those above, snap at those below. He knew the rich with their full bellies and their rotten phrases, and the poor with their contemptible patience. He knew the bribe-takers and the stiff-necked ones, the braggarts and the slinkers, the thieves and forgers, ladies’ men and cowards, the harlots and their procurers, the respectable women with their hypocrisy and envy, their pretence and masquerade and play-acting; he knew it all, and it couldn’t impress him no more. And there were no real things in the world except stench and misery and avarice and greed and treachery and malevolence and lust. The world was a loathsome thing and had to be destroyed. And any one who had come to see that, must take the last step, the very last, to the place where despair and contempt are self-throttled, where you could go no further, where you heard the Angel of the Last Day beating at the dull walls of the flesh, whither neither the light penetrated nor the darkness, but where one was alone with one’s rage and could feel oneself utterly, and heighten that self and take something sacred and smash it into bits. That was it, that! To take something holy, something pure, and become master of it and grind it to the earth and stamp it out. Christian had never heard anything more dreadful. He gazed into a broken universe. Even in its pale representation, the fury of hatred burst forth like seething lava, and turned the blossoms of the earth to ashes. Horror had reached its supreme point. The fate of the immemorial race of man was sealed. And yet--the fact that this man had come hither, had had the impulse to reveal himself, that he sat there in the darkness and writhed and spoke of monstrous things and plunged into the great deeps that he had opened--in this very fact Christian perceived a shimmer of most mysterious hope, and a first faint ray of dawn upon a hitherto unknown, uncertain path.