These, the tragical children of folly, were astute: they played with lightning, and they knew the conditions of the game; victories were to be had.
The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they thought little of: for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal deity called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only in the Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo idea of the union of these two periods.

Still he is occasionally a benevolent god to the appetites; which have but to be continuous to establish him in permanence; and as nothing in us more readily supposes perpetuity than the appetite rushing to destroy itself, the rational nature of the most universal worship on earth is perceived at once.
Now, the price paid for a victory is this: that having been favoured in a single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity--the Black Goddess of the golden fringes--men believe in her for ever after, behold her everywhere, they belong to her.

Their faith as to sowing and reaping has gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is: she has the power to attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding their impassioned devotion with cuffs and scorns.

They have ceased to have a first notion upon anything without a second haunting it, which directs them to propitiate Fortune.
But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom of our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of commonplace to insist on such reflections.

Many of them, indeed, took the union of the Black Goddess and the Rosy Present for the composition of the very Arch-Fiend.