ow he has flitted away from us, and we
see what he was made of--the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and
throned. Now we have no God.

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." It may be so. Most
things said or written have been the work of fools.

This thing is certain--he is a fool who says, "No man hath said in his
heart, There is no God."

It has been said many thousand times in hearts with profound bitterness
of earnest faith.

We do not cry and weep: we sit down with cold eyes and look at the
world. We are not miserable. Why should we be? We eat and drink, and
sleep all night; but the dead are not colder.

And we say it slowly, but without sighing, "Yes, we see it now; there is
no God."

And, we add, growing a little colder yet. "There is no justice. The ox
dies in the yoke, beneath its master's whip; it turns its anguish-filled
eyes on the sunlight, but there is no sign of recompense to be made it.
The black man is shot like a dog, and it goes well with the shooter.
The innocent are accused and the accuser triumphs. If you will take the
trouble to scratch the surface anywhere, you will see under the skin a
sentient being writhing in impotent anguish."

And, we say further, and our heart is as the heart of the dead for
coldness, "There is no order: all things are driven about by a blind
chance."

What a soul drinks in with its mother's milk will not leave it in a
day. From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the
heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on
a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn,
depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things;
but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can
alter. To us, from the beginning, nature has been but a poor plastic
thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his
deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not;
to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant to
see Nature as she is--the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?
When the soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of the
claws and talons break themselves off in him. It is not the work of a
day to squeeze them out.

And so, for us, the human-like driver and guide being gone, all
existence, as we look out at it with our chilled, wondering eyes, is an
aimless rise and swell of shifting water