'Come to me, my mother! I
cannot live without you! Come soon-come soon, before I die of a broken
heart!' That was my cry every night, until worn out with my vigil I
would go back to my room. And she never came, and at last I knew that
she was dead and that we were separated for ever - that there is no
life after death."
His story pierced me to the heart, and without another word I left
him, but I succeeded in making myself believe that grief for his
mother had made him mad, that as a boy he had got these delusions in
his mind and had kept them all his life. Now this recollection haunted
me. Then one day, with my mind in this troubled state, in reading
George Combo's Physiology I came on a passage in which the question of
the desire for immortality is discussed, his contention being that it
is not universal, and as a proof of this he affirms that he himself
had no such desire.
This came as a great shock to me, since up to the moment of reading it
I had in my ignorance taken It for granted that the desire is inherent
in every human being from the dawn of consciousness to the end of
life, that it is our chief desire, and is an instinct of the soul like
that physical instinct of the migratory bird which calls it annually
from the most distant regions back to its natal home. I had also taken
it for granted that our hope of immortality, or rather our belief in
it, was founded on this same passion in us and in its universality.
The fact that there were those who had no such desire was sufficient
to show that it was no spiritual instinct or not of divine origin.
There were many more shocks of this kind - when I go back in memory to
that sad time, it seems almost incredible to me that that poor
doubtful faith in revealed religion still survived, and that the
struggle still went on, but go on it certainly did.
To many of my readers, to all who have interested themselves in the
history of religion and its effect on individual minds - its
psychology - all I have written concerning my mental condition at that
period, will come as a twice-told tale, since thousands and millions
of men have undergone similar experiences and have related them in
numberless books. And here I must beg my reader to bear in mind that
in the days of my youth we had not yet fallen into the indifference
and scepticism which now infects the entire Christian world. In those
days people still believed; and here in England, in the very centre
and mind of the world, many thousands of miles from my rude
wilderness, the champions of the Church were in deadly conflict with
the Evolutionists.
