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The Nemesis of Faith, Or, The History of Markham Sutherland
The Nemesis of Faith Or The History of Markham Sutherland Author:James Anthony Froude Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONFESSIONS OF A SCEPTIC. That there is something very odd about this life of ours, that it is a kind of Egyptian bondage, where a daily tale of bricks must b... more »e given in, yet where we have no straw given us wherewith to burn them, is a very old confession indeed. We cry for something we cannot find; we cannot satisfy ourselves with what we do find, and there is more than cant in that yearning after a better land of promise, as all men know when they are once driven in upon themselves, and compelled to be serious. Every pleasure palls, every employment possible for us is in the end vanity and disappointment—the highest employment most of all. We start with enthusiasm—out we go, each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves —too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has been as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master- worker has...« less