Read "The altar fire" by A.C. Benson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The question is this: Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity, attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities, sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts? Is it attainable for one like myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes of mood? Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical health, depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may not belong to a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?
By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical fortitude. I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain -- and about which, at all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.