After We Had Gone Back Impoverished To Our Old Home Where I First Saw
The Light-Which Was Still My
Father's property and all he had left-I
continued my reading, and was so taken up with the affairs of
The
universe, seen and unseen, that I did not feel the change in our
position and comforts too greatly. I took my share in the rough work
and was much out-of-doors on horseback looking after the animals, and
not unhappy. I was already very tall and thin at that time, in my
sixteenth year, still growing rapidly, and though athletic, it was
probable that some weakness had been left in me by the fever. At all
events, I had scarcely settled down to the new way of life before a
fresh blow fell upon me, a malady which, though it failed to kill me,
yet made shipwreck of all my new-born earthly hopes and dreams, and a
dismal failure of my after life.
One day I undertook, unaided, to drive home a Small troop of cattle we
had purchased at a distance of a good many leagues, and was in the
saddle from morning till after dark in a continuous flooding rain and
violent wind. The wind was against me, and the beasts were incessantly
trying to turn and rush back to the place they had been taken from,
and the fight with wind and cattle went wearily on, the driving rain
gradually soaking through my woollen poncho, theft through my clothes
to my skin, and trickling down until my long boots were full and
slopping over at the knees. For the last half of that midwinter day my
feet and legs were devoid of feeling. The result of it Was rheumatic
fever and years of bad health, with constant attacks of acute pain and
violent palpitation of the heart which would last for hours at a
stretch. From time to time I was sent or taken to consult a doctor in
the city, and in that way from first to last I was in the hands of
pretty well all the English doctors in the place, but they did me no
permanent good, nor did they say anything to give me a hope of
complete recovery. Eventually we were told that it was a practically
hopeless case, that I had "outgrown my strength," and had a
permanently bad heart and might drop down at any moment.
Naturally this pronouncement had a most disastrous effect on me. That
their diagnosis proved in the end to be wrong mattered nothing, since
the injury had been done and could not be undone if I lived a century.
For the blow had fallen at the most critical period in life, the
period of transition when the newly-awakened mind is in its freshest,
most receptive stage, and is most curious, most eager, when knowledge
is most readily assimilated, and, above everything, when the
foundations of character and the entire life of the man are laid.
I speak, it will be understood, of a mind that had not been trained or
pressed into a mould or groove by schoolmasters and schools-of a mind
that was a forest wilding rather than a plant, one in ten thousand
like it, grown under glass in a prepared soil, in a nursery.
That I had to say good-bye to all thoughts of a career, all bright
dreams of the future which recent readings had put into my mind, was
not felt as the chief loss, it was in fact a small matter compared
with the dreadful thought that I must soon resign this earthly life
which was so much more to me, as I could not help thinking, than to
most others. I was like that young man with a ghastly face I had seen
bound to a post in our barn; or like any wretched captive, tied hand
and foot and left to lie there until it suited his captor to come back
and cut his throat or thrust him through with a spear, or cut him into
strips with a sword, in a leisurely manner so as to get all the
satisfaction possible out of the exercise of his skill and the
spectacle of gushing blood and his victim's agony.
Nor was this all nor even the worst which had be-fallen me; I now
discovered that in spite of all my strivings after the religious mind,
that old dread of annihilation which I had first experienced as a
small child was not dead as I had fondly imagined, but still lived and
worked in me. This visible world - this paradise of which I had had so
far but a fleeting glimpse-the sun and moon and other worlds peopling
all space with their brilliant constellations, and still other suns
and systems, so utterly remote, in such inconceivable numbers as to
appear to our vision as a faint luminous mist in the sky-all this
universe which had existed for millions and billions of ages, or from
eternity, would have existed in vain, since now it was doomed with my
last breath, my last gleam of consciousness, to come to nothing. For
that was how the thought of death presented itself to me.
Against this appalling thought I struggled with all my power, and
prayed and prayed again, morning, noon and night, wrestling with God,
as the phrase was, trying as it were to wring something from His hands
which would save me, and which He, for no reason that I could
discover, withheld from me.
It was not strange in these circumstances that I became more and more
absorbed in the religious literature of which we had a good amount on
our bookshelves - theology, sermons, meditations for every day in the
year, _The Whole Duty of Man, A Call to the Unconverted_, and many
other old works of a similar character.
Among these I found one entitled, if I remember rightly, _An Answer_
to the Infidel, and this work, which I took up eagerly in the
expectation that it would allay those maddening doubts perpetually
rising in my mind and be a help and comfort to me, only served to make
matters worse, at all events for a time.
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