He took the young man’s hand, saying:
“I will not say another word. You have found your own answer. You would not understand better if I talked forever. Find God, and tell Him, what you have told me.”
In the night Jeffrey Whiting rode back up the long way to the hills and home. He was still bewildered, disappointed, and a little resentful of the Bishop’s brief manners with him. He had gone looking for sympathy, understanding, help. And he had been told to find God.
Find God? How did men go about to find God? Wasn’t all the world continually on the lookout for God, and who ever found Him? Did the preachers find Him? Did the priests find Him? And if they did, what did they say to Him? Did people who were sick, and people who said God had answered their prayers and punished their enemies for them; did they find God?
Did they find Him when they prayed? Did they find Him when they were in trouble? What did the Bishop mean? Find God? He must have meant something? How did the Bishop himself find God? Was there some word, some 331 key, some hidden portal by which men found God? Was God to be found here on the hills, in the night, in the open?
God! God! his soul cried incoherently, how can I come, how can I find! A wordless, baffled, impotent cry, that reached nowhere.
The Bishop had once said it. We get no answer.
Then the sense of his guilt, unending, ineradicable guilt, swept down upon him again and beat him and flattened him and buffeted him. It left him shaken and beaten. He was not able to face this thing. It was too big for him. He was after all only a boy, a lost boy, travelling alone in the dark, under the unconcerned stars. He had been caught and crushed between forces and passions that were too much for him. He was little and these things were very great.
Unconsciously the heart within him, the child heart that somehow lives ever in every man, began to speak, to speak, without knowing it, direct to God.
It was not a prayer. It was not a plea. It was not an excuse. It was the simple unfolding of the heart of a child to the Father who made it. The heart was bruised. A weight was crushing it. It could not lift itself. That was all; the cry of helplessness complete, of dependence utter and unreasoning.