I
repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of
nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all
in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God has no
original nothingness with which to take refuge. He is a live discord, an
anti-truth. He is a death fighting against life, and doomed to endless
vanity; an opposition to the very power by whose strength yet in him he
opposes; a world of contradictions, not greedy after harmony, but greedy
for lack of harmony--his being an abyss of positive negation. Not such
was Hester, and although her thoughts now came and went without her,
they did not come and go without God; and a truth from the depths of her
own true being was on its way to console her.
How would her lover receive the news?--that was the agitating question;
what would he thereupon do?
She could not at once write to acquaint him with the grief and disgrace
that had fallen upon them, for she did not know where precisely he was:
his movements were not fixed; and she dreaded the falling of such a
letter as she would have to write into any hands except his own.
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