oman, the one
denying after Faber's fashion, the other believing after hers, should
not live together, and love and help each other. Of all valueless
things, a merely speculative theology is one of the most valueless. To
her, God had never been much more than a name--a name, it is true, that
always occurred to her in any vivid moment of her life; but the Being
whose was that name, was vague to her as a storm of sand--hardly so much
her father as was the first forgotten ancestor of her line. And now it
was sad for her chat at such a time of peculiar emotion, when the heart
is ready to turn of itself toward its unseen origin, feeling after the
fountain of its love, the very occasion of the tide Godward should be an
influence destructive of the same. Under the growing fascination of the
handsome, noble-minded doctor, she was fast losing what little shadow of
faith she had possessed. The theology she had attempted to defend was so
faulty, so unfair to God, that Faber's atheism had an advantage over it
as easy as it was great. His unbelief was less selfish than Juliet's
faith; consequently her faith sank, as her conscience rose meeting what
was true in Faber's utterances. How could it be otherwise when she
opposed lies uttered for the truth, to truths uttered for the lie? the
truth itself she had never been true enough to look in the face. As her
arguments, yea the very things she argued for, went down before him, her
faith, which, to be faith, should have been in the living source of all
true argument, found no object, was swept away like the uprooted weed it
was, and whelmed in returning chaos.

"If such is your God," he said, "I do Him a favor in denying His
existence, for His very being would be a disgrace to Himself. At times,
as I go my rounds, and think of the horrors of misery and suffering
before me, I feel as if I were out on a campaign against an Evil
supreme, the Author of them all. But when I reflect that He must then
actually create from very joy in the infliction and sight of agony, I am
ashamed of my foolish and cruel, though but momentary imagination,
and--'There can be no such being!' I say. "I but labor in a region of
inexorable law, blind as Justice herself; law that works for good in the
main, and whose carelessness of individual suffering it is for me, and
all who know in any way how, to supplement with the individual care of
man for his fellow-men, who, either from Nature's own necessity, or by
neglect