"It's this physical exhaustion," he said to himself aloud, trying to find an anodyne to thought in the sound of his own voice. "My brain is starved for want of blood. No one can live as I have been living and retain a sane judgment. It was because the hermits of old starved themselves in the desert that they saw visions. Yet it is odd that I, of all men, should weaken thus. I must go out into the streets again, come what may. The mind feeds upon itself and conjures up wild and foolish thoughts in a horrible little box like this."
With a heavy sigh he went slowly out of the room and down the steep stairs. Never in all his life had he felt so lost and hopeless; so alone and deserted.
Another man in his position would have called out upon God, either with mad and puny revilings in that He had forsaken him, or with a last piteous cry for help.
Joseph did not believe in God.
All his life he had lived without God. He had ignored the love of the Father and the necessity of faith in His Son Jesus Christ. The temple of his body was all empty of the Paraclete. Now he felt sure that there was no God; never had been any God; never would be any God.
He was at the darkest hour of all, and yet, with a strange nervous force, he clenched one lean hand until the shrunken muscle sprang up in coils upon the back of it, resolving that come what might he would not give in. There was no God, only a blind giant, Circumstance—well, he would fight that!
His mental attitude was a curious one, curiously illogical. Keen and well-balanced as the scientific side of him was, the man—like all those who openly profess disbelief—was unable to see what might almost be called the grim humor of his attitude.
"I do not believe in God!" the atheist cries, and then immediately afterwards shakes his fist at the Almighty and bids Him to do His worst!
Man challenging God! There is no more grotesque and terrible thing in human life than this.
But, as the world knows now, God had a special purpose in his dealings with this man.