“You accept a thousand things without proof, and a thousand things may be perfectly true, and have no proof. But if you cannot be sure, why therefore do you turn away? Is the thing assuredly false? Then you ought of course to turn away. Can you prove it false? You cannot. Again, why do you turn away? That a thing is not provably true, cannot be reason for turning from it, otherwise farewell to all theory and all scientific research! Is the thing less good, less desirable, less worth believing, in itself, that you cannot thus satisfy yourself concerning it?

“The very chance that such a thing may be true, the very fact that it cannot be disproved, is large reason for an honest, and continuous, and unending search. Do you hold any door in your nature open for the possibility of a God having a claim on you? The truth is, as I hinted before, that you are not drawn to the idea because you do not like it. That is why you turn away, not because you have no proof.

“If the man then shifted his ground and said, ‘He seemed to me not a good being, and I said therefore that he cannot exist,’ I should reply, There you are right. But a thing that cannot be, cannot render impossible a thing that can be—a thing against whose existence there are no such arguments as have rightly shown that the other cannot be. In logical balance you must admit that a creative being who is good may exist.

“But the final question is always this: Have you acted, or rather, are you acting according to the conscience which is the one guide to truth, to all that is?”

“But,” said Barbara, “perhaps the man would say that we see such suffering in the world, that the being who made it cannot possibly be both strong and good, otherwise he would not allow it. Richard has said that very thing to me.”

“He might be both strong and good, yet have some reason for allowing it, or even causing it, which those who suffer will themselves one day see. For the infliction of suffering can be to greater purpose, though many cannot see that.