Written in his sketchbook.

A REAL debt of gratitude—that is, founded on a disinterested act of kindness—cannot be canceled by any subsequent unkindness on the part of our benefactor. If the favor be of a pecuniary nature, we may, indeed, by returning an equal or greater sum, balance the moneyed part; but we cannot liquidate the kind motive by the setting off against it any number of unkind ones. For an after injury can no more undo a previous kindness than we can prevent in the future what has happened in the past. So neither can a good act undo an ill one: a fearful truth! For good and evil have a moral life, which nothing in time can extinguish; the instant they exist, they start for Eternity. How, then, can a man who has once sinned, and who has not of himself cleansed his soul, be fit for heaven where no sin can enter? I seek not to enter into the mystery of the atonement, “which even the angels sought to comprehend and could not”; but I feel its truth in an unutterable conviction, and that, without it, all flesh must perish. Equally deep, too, and unalienable, is my conviction that “the fruit of sin is misery.” A second birth to the soul is therefore a necessity which sin forces upon us. Aye,—but not against the desperate will that rejects it.

  This conclusion was not anticipated when I wrote the first sentence of the preceding paragraph. But it does not surprise me, for it is but a recurrence of what I have repeatedly experienced, namely, that I never lighted on any truth which I inwardly felt as such, however apparently remote from our religious being (as, for instance, in the philosophy of my art), that, by following it out, did not find its illustration and confirmation in some great doctrine of the Bible,—the only true philosophy, the sole fountain of light, where the dark questions of the understanding which have so long stood, like chaotic spectres, between the fallen soul and its reason, at once lose their darkness and their terror.