A Confession

: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

I ar­gued as fol­lows, telling my­self that the know­ledge of faith flows, like all hu­man­ity with its reason, from a mys­ter­i­ous source. That source is God, the ori­gin both of the hu­man body and the hu­man reason. As my body has des­cen­ded to me from God, so also has my reason and my un­der­stand­ing of life, and con­sequently the vari­ous stages of the de­vel­op­ment of that un­der­stand­ing of life can­not be false. All that people sin­cerely be­lieve in must be true; it may be dif­fer­ently ex­pressed but it can­not be a lie, and there­fore if it presents it­self to me as a lie, that only means that I have not un­der­stood it. Fur­ther­more I said to my­self, the es­sence of every faith con­sists in its giv­ing life a mean­ing which death does not des­troy

That shore was God; that dir­ec­tion was tra­di­tion; the oars were the free­dom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life was re­newed in me and I again began to live.