"Oh, do you not know, Martin? God in heaven is dead."
"How can you talk such nonsense, Käthe? How can God die? Why, He is immortal, and will live through all eternity."
"Is that really true?" persisted she, as if she could hardly credit his assertion that God still lived.
"How can you doubt it? So surely as there is a God in heaven," asserted the aroused theologian, "so sure is it that He can never die."
"And yet," said she demurely, in a tone which made him look up at her, "though you do not doubt there is a God, you become hopeless and discouraged as if there were none. It seemed to me you acted as if God were dead."
The spell was broken; Luther heartily laughed at his wife's lesson, and her ingenious way of presenting it. "I observed," he remarked, "what a wise woman my wife was, who mastered my sadness."
Jean Paul Richter's dream of "No God" is one of the most somber things in all literature,—"tempestuous chaos, no healing hand, no Infinite Father. I awoke. My soul wept for joy that it could again worship the Infinite Father.... And when I arose, from all
nature I heard flowing sweet, peaceful tones, as from evening bells."