“Opinions differ on that point”—said the monk quietly—“I never sought to check your ambition—I simply said—Take God with you. Do not leave Him out. He IS. Therefore His existence must be included in everything, even in the scientific examination of a drop of dew. Without Him you grope in the dark—you lack the key to the mystery. As an example of this, you are yourself battering against a shut door, and fighting with a Force too strong for you.”
“I must have proofs of God!” said El-Râmi very deliberately—“Nature proves her existence; let God prove His!”
“And does He not prove it?” inquired the monk with mingled passion and solemnity—“Have you to go farther than the commonest flower to find Him?”
El-Râmi shrugged his shoulders with an air of light disdain.
“Nature is Nature,”—he said—“God—an there be a God—is God. If God works through Nature He arranges things very curiously on a system of mutual destruction. You talk of flowers,—they contain both poisonous and healing properties,—and the poor human race has to study and toil for years before finding out which is which. Is that just of Nature—or God? Children never know at all,—and the poor little wretches die often through eating poison-berries of whose deadly nature they were not aware. That is what I complain of—we are not aware of evil, and we are not made aware. We have to find it out for ourselves. And I maintain that it is wanton cruelty on the part of the Divine Element to punish us for ignorance which we cannot help. And so the plan of mutual destructiveness goes on, with the most admirable persistency; the eater is in turn eaten, and, as far as I can make out, this seems to be the one Everlasting Law. Surely it is an odd and inconsequential arrangement? As for the business of creation, that is easy, if once we grant the existence of certain component parts of space. Look at this, for example”—and he took from a corner a thin steel rod about the size of an ordinary walking cane—“If I use this magnet, and these few crystals”—and he opened a box on the table, containing some sparkling powder like diamond dust, a pinch of which he threw up into the air—“and play with them thus, you see what happens!”
And with a dexterous steady motion he waved the steel rod rapidly round and round in the apparently empty space where he had tossed aloft the pinch of powder, and gradually there grew into shape out of the seeming nothingness a round large brilliant globe of prismatic tints, like an enormously magnified soap-bubble, which followed the movement of the steel magnet rapidly and accurately. The monk lifted himself a little in his chair and watched the operation with interest and curiosity—till presently El-Râmi dropped the steel rod from sheer fatigue of arm. But the globe went on revolving steadily by itself for a time, and El-Râmi pointed to it with a smile—
“If I had the skill to send that bubble-sphere out into space, solidify it, and keep it perpetually rolling,” he said lightly, “it would in time exhale its own atmosphere and produce life, and I should be a very passable imitation of the Creator.”
At that moment the globe broke, and vanished like a melting snowflake, leaving no trace of its existence but a little white dust which fell in a round circle on the carpet. After this display, El-Râmi waited for his guest to speak, but the monk said nothing.
“You see,” continued El-Râmi—“it requires a great deal to satisfy me with proofs. I must have tangible Fact, not vague Imagining.”
The monk raised his eyes,—what searching calm eyes they were!—and fixed them full on the speaker.