mother of mine? If I have been abandoned, who has done it? I cannot conceal from myself that some one bore me loving me. Who is that some one? Again God.
He knows and sees my searching, my despair, my struggle. “He is,” I said to myself. I needed but for a moment to recognize that, when life immediately rose in me, and I felt the possibility and joy of existence. But again I passed over from the recognition of the existence of God to the search after the relation to him, and again there presented himself to me that God, our creator in three persons, who sent his Son the Redeemer. Again that God, who was separate from the world, from me, melted like a piece of ice, melted under my very eyes, and again nothing was left, and again the source of life ran dry; I fell into despair and felt that there was nothing left for me to do but kill myself. What was worst of all, I felt that I could not do even that.
Not twice, or three times, but dozens, hundreds of times I arrived at these states, now of joy and animation, and now again of despair and the consciousness of the impossibility of life.
I remember, it was early in spring, I was by myself in the forest, listening to the sounds of the woods. I listened and thought all the time of one and the same thing that had formed the subject of my thoughts for the last three years. I was again searching after God.
“All right, there is no God,” I said to myself, “there is not such a being as would be, not my concept, but reality, just like my whole life,—there is no such being. And nothing, no miracles, can prove him to me, because the miracles would be my concept, and an irrational one at that.
“But my idea about God, about the one I am searching after?” I asked myself. “Where did that idea come from?” And with this thought the joyous waves of life again rose in me. Everything about me revived, received
