“But he couldn't, you know, if he didn't believe in God!”
“I understand; only, if he loved the poor beasts very much, and thought what a bad time they have of it in the world, I don't know how he could help hoping at least, that there was a God somewhere who would somehow make up to them for it all! For my own part I don't know how to be content except the beasts themselves, when it is all over and the good time come, are able to say, 'After all, it is well worth it, bad as it was!'”
“But what if it was just that suffering that made the man think there could not be a God, or he would put a stop to it?”
“That looks to me very close to believing in God.”
“How do you make that out?”
“If a man believed in a God that did not heed the suffering of the creation, one who made men and women and beasts knowing that they must suffer, and suffer only—and went on believing so however you set him thinking about it, I should say to him, 'You believe in a devil, and so are in the way to become a devil yourself.' A thousand times rather would I believe that there was no God, and that the misery came by chance from which there was no escape. What I do believe is, that there is a God who is even now doing his best to take all men and all beasts out of the misery in which they find themselves.”
“But why did he let them come into it?”
“That the God will tell them, to their satisfaction, so soon as ever they shall have become capable of understanding it. There must be things so entirely beyond our capacity, that we cannot now see enough of them to be able even to say that they are incomprehensible. There must be millions of truths that have not yet risen above the horizon of what we call the finite.”
“Then you would not think a person so very, very wicked, for not believing in a God?”
“That depends on the sort of God he fancied himself asked to believe in. Would you call a Greek philosopher wicked for not believing in Mercury or Venus? If a man had the same notion of God that I have, or anything like it, and did not at least desire that there might be such a God, then I confess I should have difficulty in understanding how he could be good. But the God offered him might not be worth believing in, might even be such that it was a virtuous act to refuse to believe in him.”