" He thought
with himself, "God cannot help men with wisdom when their minds are
in too great a tumult to hear what he says!" He tried to lift up his
heart and make a silence in his soul.
As he stood he seemed to see, through the dark, the gloomy place as
it first appeared when he threw in the lighted letter. All at once
he started from his quiescence, dropped on his hands and knees, and
crawled until he found the flat stone like a gravestone. Out came
his knife, and he dug away the earth at one end, until he could get
both hands under it. Then he heaved it from the floor, and shifting
it along, got it under the opening in the wall.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
A MORAL FUNGUS.
Spiritual insanity, cupidity, cruelty, and possibly immediate
demoniacal temptation had long been working in and on a mind that
had now ceased almost to distinguish between the real and the
unreal. Every man who bends the energies of an immortal spirit to
further the ends and objects of his lower being, fails so to
distinguish; but with the earl the blindness had wrought outward as
well as inwardly, so that he was even unable, during considerable
portions of his life, to tell whether things took place outside or
inside him. Nor did this trouble him--he was past caring. He would
argue that what equally affected him had an equal right to be by him
regarded as existent. He paid no heed to the different natures of
the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different
demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a
long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience,
arrived nearly at non-individuality.
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