At length his mental disease took a new turn.

He became, of a sudden, most morbidly and fanatically--I was about to say religious: but that is not the word; let me call it pseudo-religious.

His strong sense and cultivated taste did not allow him to delight in the raving tracts of illiterate fanatics--and yet out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense.

He lost sight of God the Father, and night and day dreamed only of God the Avenger.

His vivid imagination was perverted to raise out of its own abyss phantoms of colossal terror.