Page:Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897).djvu/67

 over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. . ..

“Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;’ to which my whole Me now made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!’ From that hour,” Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, “I began to be a man.”

And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:—

We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism,—him who made the garden and the serpent, and pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology; but, both alike, they