It was one of that interminable series of controversial volumes, containing the theological speculations of the ancient fathers of the Church.

With the patient perseverance so characteristic of his countrymen, he was endeavoring to detect truth amidst the numberless inconsistencies of heated controversy; to reconcile jarring propositions; to search out the thread of scholastic argument amidst the rant of prejudice and the sallies of passion, and the coarse vituperations of a spirit of personal bitterness, but little in accordance with the awful gravity of the question at issue.
Wearied and baffled in his researches, he at length closed the volume, and rested his care-worn forehead upon his hand.

"What avail," he said, "these long and painful endeavors, these midnight vigils, these weary studies, before which heart and flesh are failing?
What have I gained?
I have pushed my researches wide and far; my life has been one long and weary lesson; I have shut out from me the busy and beautiful world; I have chastened every youthful impulse; and at an age when the heart should be lightest and the pulse the freest, I am grave and silent and sorrowful,' and the frost of a premature age is gathering around my heart.

Amidst these ponderous tomes, surrounded by the venerable receptacles of old wisdom, breathing, instead of the free air of heaven, the sepulchral dust of antiquity, I have become assimilated to the objects around me; my very nature has undergone a metamorphosis of which Pythagoras never dreamed.

I am no longer a reasoning creature, looking at everything within the circle of human investigation with a clear and self-sustained vision, but the cheated follower of metaphysical absurdities, a mere echo of scholastic subtilty.