and body, after mature reflection and with full confidence in my
right so to do, I am about to end my life here.

As to the second question, "Why should Evil be allowed to triumph?" I
confess that my mind cannot argue in a circle and say, "You are born
full of Original Sin, and if you sin you are Damned"--a vicious circle
drawn for me by the gloomy, haughty, insincere and rather unintelligent
young gentleman whom I respectfully salute as Chaplain, and who regards
me and every other non-commissioned soldier as a Common, if not Low,
person.

He would not even answer my queries by means of the good old loop-hole,
"It is useless to appeal to Reason if you cannot to Faith" and so beg
the question. He said that things _were_ because the Lord said they
were, and that it was impious to doubt it. More impious was it, I
gathered, to doubt him, and to allude to Criticisms he had never read.

His infallible "proof" was "It is in the Bible".

Possibly I shall shortly know why an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Impeccable
Deity allows this world to be the Hell it is, even if there be no actual
Hell for the souls of his errant Creatures (in spite of the statements
of the Chaplain who appears to have exclusive information on the
subject, inaccessible to laymen, and to rest peacefully assured of a
Real Hell for the wicked,--nonconforming, and vulgar).

At present I cannot understand and I do not know--though I am informed
and infused with a burning and reverent desire to understand and to
know--why Evil should be allowed to triumph, as in my own case, as well
as in those of millions of others, it does. And thirdly, why does the
man who would never deny beauty in a poem or picture because he failed
to see it while others did, deny that immaterial forms of the dead
exist, because he has never seen one, though others have?

I know of so many many men who would blush to be called
"I-believe-what-I-see men," who yet laugh to scorn the bare idea of the
materialization and visualization of visitants from the spirit world,
because they have never seen one. I have so often met the argument, "The
ghost of a man I might conceive--but I can _not_ conceive the appearance
of the ghost of a pair of trousers or of a top-hat," offered as though
it were unanswerable. Surely the spirit, aura, shade, ghost, soul,
ego--what you will--can permeate and penetrate and pervade clothing and
other matter as well as flesh?

Well, once again, I do not know,--and yet