In all this critical readjustment, the thought he had to spare for his
fellow-men was of small account: his fate was not bound to theirs by the
altruism of a later generation. It was a time of intense individualism;
and his efforts towards spiritual emancipation were made on his own
behalf alone. The one link he had with his fellows--if link it could be
termed--was his earnest wish to avoid giving offence: never would it
have occurred to him to noise his heterodoxy abroad. Nor did he want to
disturb other people's convictions. He respected those who could still
draw support from the old faith, and, moreover, had not a particle of
the proselytiser in him. He held that religion was either a matter of
temperament, or of geographical distribution; felt tolerantly inclined
towards the Jews, and the Chinese; and did not even smile at processions
to the Joss-house, and the provisioning of those silent ones who needed
food no more.
But just as little as he intermeddled with the convictions of others
would he brook interference with his own. It was the concern of no third
person what paths he followed in his journeyings after the truth--in
his quest for a panacea for the ills and delusions of life. For, call it
what he would--Biblical criticism, scientific inquiry--this was his
aim first and last. He was trying to pierce the secret of existence--to
rede the riddle that has never been solved.--What am I? Whence have I
come? Whither am I going? What meaning has the pain I suffer, the evil
that men do? Can evil be included in God's scheme?--And it was well, he
told himself, as he pressed forward, that the flame in him burnt
unwaveringly, which assured him of his kinship with the Eternal, of the
kinship of all created things; so unsettling and perplexing were the
conclusions at which he arrived.
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