knew
better, yet there you were ... God! Even animals had the excuse of
nature's indomitable will!

Yes, this made him face things he had been trying to pass casually by.
Forty-two, a touch of gray at the temples, a body like a boy's, hooded
eyes like a hawk's, and a feeling in him somehow that an organ--his
heart maybe--was dead: not ailing--just unalive. Once he had zest, and
he didn't even have despair now. If he could only have despair....

Despair was healthy. It meant revolt. A man might sob, gnash his teeth,
batter walls with his bare fists, but that only meant he was alive in
every fiber. He might curse the stars, but he was aware of their
brilliance. He might curse the earth that would one day take his
lifeless body, but he must know its immense fecundity. A man in revolt,
in despair, was a healthy man.

But despair was so futile. Ah, there it was! Life's futility. It was the
sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility,
spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him
of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense
mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to
believe, not to accept him as an incontrovertible fact.

But the God of degenerate peoples, the antagonistic, furious, implacable
God--that was a ridiculous conception. A cheap, a vain one. "As flies to
wanton boys, are we to the gods." Wasn't that how Shakspere's blind king
had uttered it? "They kill us for their sport." How strangely
flattering--to believe that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought
the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a
stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering
about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, his poor natural
functions!

And as to the God of the optimists, how ridiculous, too. "The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want." So pathetic! They never saw that they did
want. That for every well-filled body, there were a hundred haggard men.
They thought of him as benevolent, firm but benevolent, like Mr.
Gladstone. To them he was an infinitely superior vestryman with a
tremendous power for dispensing coal and food to the poor. And the poor
devils were so patient, so loyal. And so stupid; they thought that much
flattery, much fear, would move Him. Their conception never even rose to
considering God as a gentleman, despising flattery and loathing fear.
Poor,