“She has been taught to believe in a God,” he said to himself. “She is afraid he will be angry with her because I dared question his existence! A generous God—isn’t he! If he be anywhere, why doesn’t he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn’t want him, and I don’t, I certainly shouldn’t worship him because I saw him. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a God, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!”

But Barbara was saying to herself—

“What if he has shown himself to me—one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose—and I didn’t know him!—How frightful if there should be nobody at all up there!”

She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.

Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!

13. The Beginning

— Thirteen —

The Beginning

From an early age Richard had been accustomed to despise the form he called God which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors—some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and without prophetic imagination. His antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false—that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable of receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to discover truth. To oppose, to refute, to deny is not to know the truth. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the critic will not serve to carve the celestial form of the Real, and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation and declares the nonexistence of any form worthy of worship because he has destroyed so many unworthy forms, he becomes a fool. That he has never conceived a deity worth worshipping is a poor ground for saying such cannot exist.