454
PARTISAN REVIEW
native religion,
in
order to acquaint myself with the forces I was to
contend with
in
my work as a missionary, that unwittingly, I must
confess now, I was fascinated by the weird beauty of the superstitious
beliefs of your country. Like a medical doctor working on germs, but
who has not taken adequate precautions against their noxious in–
fluence on
his
own health, I had my mind poisoned long before I
fell under the spell of the aphorism in gilt characters on the tablet
that night. Such being my weakness and such being my state of mind
after I had been roused by the lamp, you will perhaps not be sur–
prised to hear about my reactions to the more horrible visions which
were to appear to me in quick succession while for a moment I be–
came as helpless as an old superstitious Chinese peasant.
"All the time the lamp was moving toward me, leaving the
demons benign or malignant and ideograms scarlet or golden again
in the shade, until the light became oppressive to me, until I felt
as
if
I were being pushed into a white-hot furnace. The lamp came
directly toward my eyes and there it stayed for a few moments that
seemed to me as long as eternity. Then I heard a voice, 'You foreign
monk!' and I opened my eyes. The lamp was at last put aside, one
or two feet away from me, and I saw the face of the new interrogator.
I was shocked. It was a shock of recognition, for it seemed that I
knew the face. But that was a dead man's face and that man had
been dead for about twenty-five years. I blinked. Then I saw another
man's face and that man had been dead for about fifty years.
"That these two men should appear in my vision at that hour
was the last pull of the net. Not only these two faces, but bits of
scenes and echoes of sounds associated with them all rushed back.
Confusing and fragmentary as they were, as memories revived in a
heated brain must be, they somehow .all fell into place and composed
a whole picture, or a sequence of pictures, vivid in detail and imbued
with feeling, so that it seemed at that moment as
if
I were reliving
the past, just as it is said that people on their deathbeds see their
whole past lives re-enacted before their eyes. Such a vision may of
course be either an illumination or a delusion. But I was led farther
away from truth, for instead of admitting, like a good humble Chris–
tian, to the limitations of human knowledge, I presumed to have
found
'in
those mental pictures the meaning of my life. The past and
the present seemed
so
closely related that I thought I had discovered
