I was incapable of answering him.  I quickened my pace to escape from his detested persecution; but he was close beside me still.

We walked on together thus for a time, during which I heard him muttering fast to himself, like a man under fierce and malignant excitement.  We reached, at length, the gateway of my dwelling; and I turned the latch-key in the wicket, and entered the enclosure.  As we stood together within, he turned full upon me, and confronting me with an aspect whose character I felt rather than saw, he said—­

“And so you mean to be a Christian, after all!  Now just reflect how very absurdly you are choosing.  Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome.  Don’t be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory.  Why don’t you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure?  Why don’t you read it, and learn out of the mouth of the founder of Christianity, that there is one sin for which there is no forgiveness—­blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, hey?—­and that sin I myself have heard you commit by the hour—­in my presence—­in my room.  I have heard you commit it in our free discussions a dozen times.  The Bible seals against you the lips of mercy.  If it be true, you are this moment as irrevocably damned as if you had died with those blasphemies on your lips.”

Having thus spoken, he glided into the house.  I followed slowly.

His words rang in my ears—­I was stunned.  What he had said I feared might be true.  Giant despair felled me to the earth.  He had recalled, and lighted up with a glare from the pit, remembrances with which I knew not how to cope.  It was true I had spoken with daring impiety of subjects whose sacredness I now began to appreciate.  With trembling hands I opened the Bible.  I read and re-read the mysterious doom recorded by the Redeemer himself against blasphemers of the Holy Ghost—­monsters set apart from the human race, and damned and dead, even while they live and walk upon the earth.  I groaned—­I wept.  Henceforward the Bible, I thought, must be to me a dreadful record of despair.  I dared not read it.

I will not weary you with all my mental agonies.  My dear little wife did something toward relieving my mind, but it was reserved for the friend, to whose heavenly society I owed so much, to tranquillise it once more.  He talked this time to me longer, and even more earnestly than before.  I soon encountered him again.  He expounded to me the ways of Providence, and showed me how needful sorrow was for every servant of God.  How mercy was disguised in tribulation, and our best happiness came to us, like our children, in tears and wailing.  He showed me that trials were sent to call us up, with a voice of preternatural power, from the mortal apathy of sin and the world.  And then, again, in our new and better state, to prove our patience and our faith—­