Go where you will, it is all the same. Quenchum yawns when everybody else admires; Quenchum is weary when they are enraptured; and just as their enthusiasm is roused to the highest pitch, Quenchum is found to be asleep. But his unidealizing presence is felt by the whole party. His companions are half afraid or ashamed to praise the works of God himself, since Quenchum finds so little to reverence and so much to censure in what God has achieved.
Can such a man worship? Are not all his devotional feelings stifled by the heavy atmosphere of apathy that envelops his spirit? Paley tells us that the unconscious enjoyment of the mere sense of being, is to his mind one of the most convincing proofs of God's goodness. Can God seem good to one who perceives nothing good, nothing enjoyable in his own existence, or in the works of the Supreme Being?
If men carry with them to the other world, as they surely must, the traits that compose their characters in this, Quenchum's emotionless nature must be an eternal blasphemy, an everlasting curse. What would heaven be to such a man? Would he not find the supernal regions a very tiresome locality, the songs of seraphs "so-so," and the company of angels a complete nuisance?
