to which he
believed God had condemned him.

Christ had tried to save him; but the other two persons of the Holy
Blessed and Glorious Trinity had interposed, had prevented Christ from
holding any further communication with him, and together had issued
the fearful decree. That was it. Christ had not deserted him; he had
lost the right ever to approach Christ again. That accounted for
everything--the unutterable desolation, the dark despair, the
overwhelming necessity of death without one ray of hope.

All that lovely and comforting faith in the endless loving mercy of
God the Son, the Redeemer of mankind, the Friend and sometime Comrade
of man, was to prove useless to him; the gentle creed of the Baptists
could not be applied to so vile a case as his; he was at handygrips
with the dread Jehovah, the mighty Judge, the offended King of
creation.

Three Persons and one God--yes, but such different Persons; and
thinking of the triple mystery, he imagined that two of its component
parts had probably seen through him from the very beginning of his
religious fervor. Only the other part, the part that he wished was the
whole, had believed in him and gone on believing in him until it was
forbidden to do so any more.

The awe and reverence that he felt while he thought in this manner
made him bow his head and keep his eyes humbly downcast, as one not
daring to look upward to the heavenly throne; yet, profound and
sincere as was his reverential awe, he unhesitatingly translated all
the sublime mystery of the skies into the simple terms that alone
possess plain meaning to man's limited intelligence. Nothing in the
naturally courageous bent of his mind prevented him; everything in his
experiences of the Baptists, with their constant habit of homely
illustration, encouraged him to do so.

He imagined the First and the Third Persons of the Trinity seated
royally but vaguely amid the clouds, all about them a splendor of
light like that of sunset or dawn, melodious music faintly
perceptible, exquisitely beautiful forms of angels rising on white
wings, hovering obediently, fading obediently--but they themselves,
the Lords of Life and of Death, the Masters of Time and Space, were
two tangible concrete old men--two venerable wise old men--the
ultimate strained extended conception of two powerful, honored,
high-placed old men. And they talked as men would talk--not in the
human vocabulary, but conveying to each other, _somehow_, huma