She left her home, a
forlorn place, but still a home, and followed me with a sort of dumb
affection,--poor old woman. She was my senior by fifteen years, and I
had been her pride; and so she went with me from the old instinct,
which still remained, although the pride was dead, crushed by slow
horror. We kept together after that, two poor hunted creatures instead
of one; we were always fleeing, always imagining that eyes knew us,
that fingers pointed us out. I called her Shadow, and together we took
the name of Fog, a common enough name, but to us meaning that we were
nothing, creatures of the mist, wandering to and fro by night, but in
the morning gone. At last one day the cloud over my mind seemed to
lighten a little, and the thought came to me that no punishment can
endure forever, without impugning the justice of our great Creator. A
crime is committed, perhaps in a moment; the ensuing suffering, the
results, linger on earth, it may be for some years; but the end of it
surely comes sooner or later, and it is as though it had never been.
Then, for that crime, shall a soul suffer forever,--not a thousand
years, a thousand ages if you like, but forever? Out upon the
monstrous idea! Let a man do evil every moment of his life, and let
his life be the full threescore years and ten; shall there not come a
period in the endless cycles of eternity when even his punishment
shall end? What kind of a God is he whom your theologians have held up
to us,--a God who creates us at his pleasure, without asking whether
or not we wish to be created, who endows us with certain wild
passions and capacities for evil, turns us loose into a world of
suffering, and then, for our misdeeds there, our whole lives being
less than one instant's time in his sight, punishes us forever!
Never-ending tortures throughout the countless ages of eternity for
the little crimes of threescore years and ten! Heathendom shows no god
so monstrous as this.
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