“Assuredly.”
“Why?”
“Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure about.”
“He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure about.—You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain there is not?”
“Yes; absolutely certain.”
“On what grounds?”
“On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear,” answered George a little impatiently. “I am not inclined to talk about them now.—I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon.”
“And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time actually exist.”
“Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a false one.”
“A truer one than you think, perhaps,” said Helen. “That a thing should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while yours is not.”