The boy's reason, for a moment, asserted its own majesty, at the broaching of this wild doctrine; and he returned an instant answer to the preacher which would have confounded a less practised casuist.
"That would be pardoning myself," he said: "I want the Lord to pardon me: if believing that my sins were forgiven, while I feel they are not, would produce a real pardon, I need never have asked the Almighty to perform the work."
"Ah, my dear young brother!" quickly replied the preacher,—"I waited, as you have, no doubt, for weeks and weeks, expecting some miracle to be performed for me; but I found, at last, that there was no other refuge but believing. You must believe: that is your only way! All the direction that the word gives you is, 'Believe, and thou shalt be saved!' You have nothing else to do but to believe; and the moment you do believe—that moment you will be happy! Try it!"—and, so saying, the "Revivalist" hastened on to make proof of the efficacy of his wild notional catholicon upon the comfortless spirit of some less hesitating patient or penitent.
Joe's distress, when the preacher left him, became greater than ever. He felt fearful, on the one hand, of becoming a victim to self-deceit; and was horrified, on the other, with the terrible dread of losing his soul through the sin of unbelief. But the combat between his imagination and his understanding was one in which the former faculty had all the vantage-ground of his youthful age and his tendency to the marvellous,—and was immeasurably assisted by the overwhelming energy of his desire. The attainment of the new spiritual state had become his sole idea; and his reason succumbed beneath the combined strength of his wishes and the prurience of his ideality.
"The preacher says he has tried believing, and it has made him happy; therefore, I will try to believe," said Joe to himself,—becoming mentally desperate with distracting fears.
He did try; and the experiment produced,—as it could not fail to produce in such a mind, surrounded with such excitements,—a thrilling and ecstatic feeling; but yet, he doubted again, a few moments after! Thus, his intellect, all undisciplined and untutored as it had been, still revolted at the indignity of becoming the dupe of its own trickery. But the misery of doubt, and the pangs of spiritual condemnation, were more insupportable than the effort to impose upon himself the delusive assurance that he really possessed what he so ardently sought; and he, therefore, rushed to another act of desperate credence:—"I will believe! I do believe!" he wildly cried, at the full pitch of his voice, while the din and confusion of fifty persons praying aloud, at the same time, rendered his enthusiasm unnoticeable. At every new resurrection of his reason he thus drew afresh on the exorcism of his ideality, and allayed the troublous misgivings of the sterner faculty; so that, by the time the meeting was concluded, his reason had ceased to rebel,—and he went home, persuaded that he had attained the "new birth."
For some days, Joe dwelt in a frame of greater tranquillity than he had experienced since the commencement of his religious "awakenings." But the calm was a deceitful one; and was but the prelude to a more terrific tempest than had ever yet raged in the breast of the young victim to the ideal. Joe heard descriptions from the pulpit of the sectaries, of the unspeakable ecstasy of true believers; and reflected that his own feelings bore scarcely any resemblance to such highly-wrought pictures. Gradually, he felt it utterly impossible to conceal from himself the tormenting conviction that he had never received that amazing change of nature which he had been taught, so energetically and sanguinely, to expect as the fruit of his "act of faith." Instead of the "heavenly joy of assurance," which the preachers described,—Joe could not conceal from himself the fact that his nearest approaches to inward joy and calm,—fitful as they were,—resulted from the effort to assure himself; and this seemed too strained a mental state, he thought, to be termed "heavenly joy of assurance." Then, again, he was conscious that he had not the mental purity that he had heard described as one of the certain marks of regeneration. And this, soon, hurried him into a whirlpool of inward distraction;—for, instead of attributing the irritability and peevishness which now frequently agitated him to their real source,—the exhaustion of his nervous system by extreme asceticism,—the poor boy set them down, in his helpless and pitiable ignorance, to the inheritance of a nature that involved him, still, in the awful sentence of divine wrath. The tortures of disappointment thus augmented the distraction of doubt; and, at length, Joe was unable to quell his uneasiness for another moment by resorting to the act of self-delusion recommended by the "Revivalist,"—and called by him "the act of faith." Worn out, and jaded, with his daily, hourly, and almost momentary attempts to palm the fiction, anew, upon his understanding, Joe gave up the practice of "the act of faith" altogether, with a feeling of weariness and disgust and self-degradation too bitter for description!
The prostration of the youth's corporeal strength accompanied this distressing mental conflict. Dame Deborah began to watch the hectic flush on the cheek of her beloved foster-child with an aching heart; and, for the first time, entertained fears, that Time, so far from curing him of his errors, would only serve to mark his early grave. She would have interdicted his future attendance on the meetings of his religious associates; but the drooping state of his health deterred her from crossing his will, lest she should hasten the catastrophe which she began, in sadness and sorrow, to anticipate.
The good old dame finally resolved to try the efficacy of a change of scene and circumstances, as means of aiding the youth's recovery. Joe had never yet crossed the bounds of Haxey parish since he entered it; but the Dame being in the habit of attending the weekly market at Gainsborough, the nearest trading town, she determined that he should become a partner in her future journies. Her project was as sensible as it was benevolent. The new excitements created for the lad by these little expeditions could not fail to produce an issue in some degree salutary to his mind. And yet the relief he experienced might have been but temporary, had not a medicine,—seemingly hazardous,—but yet, signally well adapted for his disordered mental condition,—been opportunely disclosed from the womb of Circumstance,—the great productive source of new thinkings, new resolves, and new courses of action, which, in mockery of ourselves, we so often attribute to our own "will" and "intelligence."
Mounted on a stout grey mare, with his aged mistress behind, on an old-fashioned pillion-seat, Joe set forth on his first journey with emotions of natural curiosity; and, in the course of his progress, began to regain some degree of his constitutional cheerfulness. Eight miles of country, beheld for the first time, though its landscape was only of an ordinary and monotonous character, presented a world of objects for reflection to Joe's impressible spirit. The season was an early spring; and albeit the young equestrian felt some slight alarm when the animal sunk, beneath the superincumbent weight of himself and his companion, well-nigh up to the saddle-skirts, in the miry sloughs that intervened between Haxey and the Trent,—yet the view of the face of nature, smilingly outspread around him, fully compensated, he felt, for these occasional drawbacks on the pleasure of the journey. The few verdant meads which were scattered among the dull fallows looked as lovely, Joe thought, as they could look in any other part of England; while the cottages, in their array of honeysuckles, were attired as blushingly and beautifully, he thought, as if reared in the sunny climes of the South.