Note 17 — Part Two: How the Author Came to Be a Female-Impersonator
Reading edition
Particularly during my teens, I have worried and grieved a thousand times as much as the average individual. I say for the solace of fellow melancholiacs who retain their reason that at my present age of forty-seven, I show not the least sign of thinning or whitening hair. But this may be due to my being an ultra-androgyne, a subspecies blessed with perennial youth. Strangely also in my own case intense grief (except the agonies in my Garden of Gethsemane, for which see close of this chapter) has seemed to put physical strength into my usually weak body. I feel also that it sharpens my wits and adds to my wisdom and literary ability. “There’s not an ill wind but blows some good.”
At the age of forty-seven my conviction is that great sorrows, after the lapse of a score of years, are recognized to have been blessings in disguise. My life experience has demonstrated that “there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.” My life experience has demonstrated that the biblical teachings about human life are in general true, and that either the Christian or Jewish religion is practically necessary to save from despair and suicide men and women foreordained to drain the cup of anguish to the dregs. My personal faith in Christian doctrine, and my habit, instilled in infancy, of “taking everything to God in prayer,” have saved me from suicide a thousand times and made the deepest of sorrows tolerable.
The upshot of my very exceptional life experience is: (1) “Praise God from whom all blessings flow;” and (2) Even pain, sorrow, and death are blessings in disguise. The heart of the universe is beneficent.
As I have had an unusual religious experience, one of the numerous books I plan to write, if my life is spared, will be entitled: MY SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I have made many discoveries in religion and ethics which I long to proclaim to the world. As already stated, I have always been ultra-religious and a deep student of the Bible. Another book I plan to write will be entitled: THE BIBLE AND THE SEXUAL INSTINCT. In the latter I will seek to demolish the Church’s chief stumbling block. As already stated, I was cut out for a preacher.