During the early part of my stay in that shack, I entered my first great period of doubting—­doubt as to the moral order of the universe, doubt on the question of God.  I had gone through some great soul struggles, but this was the greatest.  It was for a time the eclipse of my soul.  For weeks I lived behind closed doors—­I was shut in with my soul.  But the community around me called in a thousand ways for help, for guidance, for instruction, and I opened the door of my shack and invited the children in.  I organized a Sunday School and taught them ethics and religion.  I got up little entertainments for them.  I procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt, and lectures on art, biography and history.  I had a peculiar method of advertising these lectures.  I informed the little cripple boy on the corner.  He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the farthest end of which a golden-haired courier informed another section; so that by the time the lecture was scheduled to begin, my audience was ready, and most of them slid down the clay bank in front of my door.  Later I went out through the surrounding towns and cities, lecturing, and raised money for a chapel, and we called it the “Chapel of the Carpenter.”

I never knew the meaning of the incarnation until I lived on “the bottoms” with the squatters.  I talked of great characters of history; I reviewed great books.  I travelled with these children over the great highways of history, science and art, and very soon we had a strong Sunday School, and helpers came from the city—­but the door of my own soul was still shut.  It seemed to me that my soul was dead.  I was without hope for myself:  everything around me was dark.  Sometimes I locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor thoughts—­not a ray of light penetrated the darkness.  My mind and intellect became duller and duller.  It was at this time that I came across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me a method of relief.  I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his philosophy that made me reason that, as I did not ask to come into life and had no option, I had a right to go out of it.  There was nothing spasmodic in the development of my thought along this line:  it was cold, calm reasoning; I had determined to go out of life.  So, with the same calm deliberation that I cooked my breakfast, I destroyed every vestige of my correspondence; and, one night went to the river to seek relief.  I was sitting on the end of a log when a man, who had been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after his supper.  He had not washed himself.  His bloody shirt stuck to his skin—­he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into conversation.  In language intelligible to him I asked him what life meant to him.

“The kids,” he said, “that’s what it means to me.  I work like one of the things I kill every day—­I kill hundreds of them, thousands of them every day.  I go home and eat like one of them, and sleep like one of them, and go back to hog it again like one of them.”