“You mean it takes God to do that?”
“I do.”
“I don’t see how he ever could set some things right.”
“He would not be God if he could not or would not do for his creature what that creature cannot do for himself, and must have done for him or lose his life.”
“Then he isn’t God, for he can’t help me.”
“Because you don’t see what can be done, you say God can do nothing—which is as much as to say there cannot be more within his scope than there is within yours! One thing is clear, that, if he saw no more than what lies within your ken, he could not be God. The very impossibility you see in the thing points to the region wherein God works.”
“I don’t quite understand you. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all a horrible mess. I wish I was dead.”
“My dear sir, is it reasonable that because a being so capable of going wrong finds himself incapable of setting right, he should judge it useless to cry to that being who called him into being to come to his aid?—and that in the face of the story—if it were but an old legend, worn and disfigured—that he took upon himself our sins?”
Leopold hung his head.
“God needs no making up to him,” the gate-keeper went on—“so far from it that he takes our sins on himself, that he may clear them out of the universe. How could he say he took our sins upon him, if he could not make amends for them to those they had hurt?”