Whether by stimulants or
narcotics, whether by company or ambition, whether by grasping or
study, whether by self-indulgence, by art, by books, by religion, by
love, by benevolence, we endeavour after another life than that
which God means for us--a life of truth, namely, of obedience,
humility, and self-forgetfulness, we walk equally in a vain show.
For God alone is, and without him we are not. This is not the mere
clang of a tinkling metaphysical cymbal; he that endeavours to live
apart from God must at length find--not merely that he has been
walking in a vain show, but that he has been himself but the phantom
of a dream. But for the life of the living God, making him be, and
keeping him being, he must fade even out of the limbo of vanities!
He more and more seldom went out of the house, more and more seldom
left his apartment. At times he would read a great deal, then for
days would not open a book, but seem absorbed in meditation--a
meditation which had nothing in it worthy of the name. In his
communications with Donal, he did not seem in the least aware that
he had made him the holder of a secret by which he could frustrate
his plans for his family. These plans he clung to, partly from
paternity, partly from contempt for society, and partly in the fancy
of repairing the wrong he had done his children's mother. The
morally diseased will atone for wrong by fresh wrong--in its turn to
demand like reparation! He would do anything now to secure his sons
in the position of which in law he had deprived them by the wrong he
had done the woman whom all had believed his wife.
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