The train began to slow down, and the Bishop stirred to gather his traps. "My lord," said Paul, curt in his ardour, "you merely propound a dilemma. Either the Holy Ghost has kept silence as to the essential central authority of the Church till He showed it to Anglo-Catholics seventy years ago, the devil triumphing meanwhile, or—or——"
"Eh?" queried the astonished Bishop.
"Or it is all a lie."
CHAPTER VI
MOUNT CARMEL
Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.—ISA. xlv.
Then Job answered and said: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him."—JOB xxiii.
There is no proof of God's existence, and you must first of all believe in it if you want to prove it. Where does he show himself? What does he save? What tortures of the heart, what disasters does he turn aside from all and each in the ruin of hearts? Where have we known or handled or embraced anything but his name? God's absence surrounds infinitely and even actually each kneeling suppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seeker who bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; it surrounds the pitiful antagonism of all religions, armed against each other, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over the agonising conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity—still haunting me—of the cemeteries of agony, the charnal-heaps of innocent soldiers, the heavy cries of the shipwrecked. Absence! Absence! In the hundred thousand years that life has tried to delay death, there has been nothing on earth more fruitless than man's cries to divinity, nothing which gives so perfect an idea of silence.—HENRI BARBUSSE: Light (translated by Fitzwater Wray).
(1)
In Mr. Kestern's study the curtains were close drawn and no gas had been lit. They were heavy crimson curtains, thick and old-fashioned, and they hung motionless, completely screening the windows. A fire flickered fitfully in the grate, with so little light that the army of dancing invading shadows rushed even more and more tempestuously and overwhelmingly forward towards it. They leapt over the sombre-backed books in their close rows on the shelves around the room, flicking a letter tooled in gold here and there as they passed. In the corners they already ruled supreme. High upon the walls they hung, like gathered clouds. Only immediately before the grate, where the big secretaire stood with its roll-top lid pushed back, was their kingdom not yet.