V
Others contemplated this King gasping for breath on the steps of the most splendid throne that still remains standing, this almost infinite power, shattered, broken, a prey to the dreadful enemies that assail suffering flesh, flesh destroyed under the most dazzling crown that the invisible and mocking hand of chance has ever suspended over a confused heap of anguish and distress....
They saw in it a new and terrifying proof of wretchedness, of human uselessness. They went about repeating to themselves what the wisdom of antiquity had already so well said, to wit that we are, that we probably always shall be, despite all our efforts, "but a grain in the proportion of substance and but the turning of a wimble in respect of time." Unbelieving in God, but believing in His shadow, they discovered in this, perhaps, a mysterious decree of that mysterious Justice which sometimes comes to place a little order in the shapeless history of men and to take vengeance on the kings for the iniquity of the nations....
They found in it many other things besides. They were not mistaken; all those things were there, because they are in ourselves and because the sense that we give to the incomprehensible actions of unknown forces soon becomes the sole human reality and peoples with more or less fraternal spectres the indifference and the nothingness that surround us.