Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/528

512 became illuminated with a strange lurid light, and the air, space, atmosphere, whatever it might be called, separated and formed a wide black-sided opening, like the deadly pit which shows itself in the center of a maelstrom. Then, as I sank slowly into this chasm, from an immeasurable distance above me, yet forcibly distinct, the words I longed for were uttered in a voice of heavenly sweetness: "He that believeth on me hath everlasting life, and shall not come unto condemnation." My intense over-natural consciousness took possession of these words, which were, I knew, my seal of safety, my passport to heaven. For one wild instant a flash of ineffable joy, the joy of a ransomed soul, was mine. I triumphed over sin and hell and the unutterable horrors of the second death. Then I plunged again into the outer darkness of the damned. For the talisman which had been so suddenly revealed was, as if in mockery, as suddenly snatched from me, and, as before, obliterated from my recollection.

Then all the chaos beyond the gap into which I was falling became convulsed, as if shaken by wind and storm. Hideous sounds of souls in torment, and still more hideous peals of mocking, fiendish laughter, took the place of the hitherto oppressive silence. I was consumed by a fearful, stinging remorse for the sins done in the body. Unlike the experience of the drowning, my sins did not present themselves to my remembrance in an array of mathematical accuracy. On the contrary, not one was specifically recalled, but, if my daily walk and conversation had through life been entirely reprobate, and the worst of crimes my constant pastimes, my consequent agony of self-reproach could not have been greater. My conscience, in its condition of exaggerated self-accusation, was not only the worm that never dieth, but a viper that would sting eternally, a ravening beast that, still insatiate, would rend and gnaw everlastingly.

I began then, without having reached any goal, and for no apparent reason, to ascend with neither more nor less swiftness than I had gone down, and in the same recumbent position in which my forsaken body lay upon the bed a fathomless distance above, and which I had been all the time powerless to change. Even the dress, a thin, figured Swiss muslin, was the same, although a hundred times more diaphanous. Even in my agonies of remorse I noticed how undisturbed by my falling were its filmy folds. There was not even a flutter in the delicate lace with which it was ornamented. As I rose, a great and terrible voice, from a vast distance, pronounced my doom in these words of startling import: "In life you declared the negation of the supernatural. For truth you took a false philosophy. You denied the power of Christ in time—you shall feel it in eternity. In life, you turned from him—in death, he turns from you. Fall, fall, fall, to rise again in hopeless misery, and sink again in lonely agony forever!" All space took up the last four words of my terrible sentence, and myriads of voices, some sweet and sad, some with wicked, vindictive glee, echoed