[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very
pleasant in its tone, just then.--The four-story brick house, which
had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is
quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts,
flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete,--and the figures as before.]
We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,--said the divinity-student.
[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had
struck it.]
If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing--I said--is to
know whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say
that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such
things. _I_ think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree
with me.
Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable
of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or
sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:
that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable
spiritual cowards--that is, if they have any imagination--that they
will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more
which they teach themselves.
I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
and those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed
in things temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable
maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
been superhuman beings.
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