' And how better can we characterize this confused and
distracting babblement which gives no good gift to man?"
"It has given him this," exclaimed Clifton, advancing towards Dr. Burge,
and seeming for a few moments to resume his old personality,--"it has
given him the knowledge of a life to come! You think it, preach it,
believe it,--but you do not _know_ it. A susceptibility to impressions
from the inmost characters of men has been mine through life. It has
been given me to perceive what facts and feelings most deeply adhered in
the mental consciousness. And I tell you, Burge, ministers both of your
communion and of mine repeat the old words of sublimest assurance, sway
congregations with descriptions bright or lurid of future worlds, yet
behind all this glowing speech and blatant confidence there has
lurked,--oh, will you deny it?--there has lurked a grovelling doubt of
man's immortality."
"I will not deny it," said Dr. Burge, with slow solemnity. "Sinners that
we are, how can we ask that faith be at no moment confused by the
thousand cries of infidelity which our profession requires us to answer?
Let my soul be chilled by transient shades of skepticism, rather than
dote in a blind and puerile credulity! If I am not at all times equally
penetrated by the great fact of man's conscious immortality, it is
because of my undesert.
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