"If the serene Highness," he said, "had wished for one to teach his children who knew the great world and the cities he would not have sent for me."
"What do you teach them, then?"
"I tell them beautiful histories," said Mark, "of good people, and of love, and of God."
"It has been proved," said the Count, "that there is no God."
"Then there is still love," said the boy.
"Yes, there is still love," said the Count, with an amused glance at the Prince; "all the more that we have got rid of a cruel God."
The boy's face flushed.
"How can you dare say that?" he said.
"Why," said the Count, with a simulated warmth, "what is the God of you pious people but a cruel God? He who condemns the weak and the ignorant—the weak whom He has Himself made weak, and the ignorant whom He keeps in darkness—to an eternity of torture for a trivial and temporary, if not an unconscious, fault? What is that God but cruel who will not forgive till He has gratified His revenge upon His own Son? What is that God but cruel—— But I need not go on. The whole thing is nothing but a figment and a dream, hatched in the diseased fancies of half-starved monks dying by inches in caves and deserts, terrified by the ghastly visions of a ruined body and a disordered mind—men so stupid and so wicked that they could not discern the nature of the man whom they professed to take for their God—a man, apparently, one of those rare natures, in advance of their time, whom friends and enemies alike misconceive and thwart; and who die, as He died, helpless and defeated, with a despairing cry to a heedless or visionary God in whom they have believed in vain."
As the Count went on, a new and terrible phase of experience was passing through Mark's mind. As the brain consists of two parts, so the mind seems dual also. Thought seems at different times to consist of different phases, each of which can only see itself—of a faith that can see no doubt—of a doubt that can conceive of no certainty; one week exalted to the highest heaven, the next plunged into the lowest hell. For the first time in his life this latter phase was passing through Mark's mind. What had always looked to him as certain as the hills and fields, seemed, on a sudden, shrunken and vanished away. His mind felt emptied and vacant; he could not even think of God. It appeared even marvellous to him that anything could have filled this vast fathomless void, much less such a lovely and populous world as that which now seemed vanished as a morning mist. He tried to rouse his energies, to grasp at and to recover his accustomed thoughts, but he seemed fascinated; the eyes of the Count rested on him, as he thought, with an evil glance. He turned faint.