CHAPTER XXV.
Doubts--Wise king of Jerusalem--Let me see--A thousand years--Nothing new--The crowd--The hymn--Faith--Charles Wesley--There he stood--Farewell, brother--Death--Sun, moon, and stars--Wind on the heath.
There was one question which I was continually asking myself at this period, and which has more than once met the eyes of the reader who has followed me through the last chapter: 'What is truth ?' I had involved myself imperceptibly in a dreary labyrinth of doubt, and, whichever way I turned, no reasonable prospect of extricating myself appeared.

The means by which I had brought myself into this situation may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma to himself; thence the cry of 'What is truth ?' I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief--I was, indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt?
With respect to crime and virtue I was in doubt; I doubted that the one was blamable and the other praiseworthy.
Are not all things subjected to the law of necessity?
Assuredly time and chance govern all things: Yet how can this be?
alas! Then there was myself; for what was I born?
Are not all things born to be forgotten?
That's incomprehensible: yet is it not so?
Those butterflies fall and are forgotten.

In what is man better than a butterfly?
All then is born to be forgotten.

Ah! that was a pang indeed; 'tis at such a moment that a man wishes to die.

The wise king of Jerusalem, who sat in his shady arbours beside his sunny fish-pools, saying so many fine things, wished to die, when he saw that not only all was vanity, but that he himself was vanity.