about our dying, He doesn't care anything about the rabbit
broken by the owl, or the toad struck by the snake.

"Now, why doesn't He care? For the first time, I knew there was a reason
that was not a cruel reason. I knew His reasons were all good. And I saw
that though He could not break the rules of His plan by telling us
things, He could give us a kind of a something inside us that should
make us work it out ourselves. We had hungers. We had one hunger for
eternal life. We had to believe in it, to help us bear this present
life. We believed it so hard that men rose up and said it was so, and we
said God had put the words into their mouths. And out of our sufferings,
pity was born, and now and then a man would be raised up so full of pity
that other men believed in him and followed everything he said and even
called him a god. And this was well, because if they had not thought he
was a god, they might not have followed him. And I seemed to be told
that a great many men were born who were sent from God, but I have not
read many books and how can I prove whether it is true?

"But Jesus Christ came, and His story is the story of the will of God.
For men believed His father was God. That is to keep in our minds always
the fatherhood of God. And his mother was believed to be a virgin. I do
not know how to say this, but I was given to believe that that was no
more true than I had thought, but still that it was the truest of all.
It is one of the things we are to believe. We are to learn from it--how
can I say?--that there is a heavenly birth out of purity and light. It
is a symbol. That is the word: a symbol. And His death for mankind is
the everlasting symbol of man's duty: to die for one another. And He
went into the grave, and ascended into heaven, and so shall we all die
and live again. But every observance of every church is a
symbol--nothing more. And the man that was a god is a symbol and nothing
more. But nothing could be more. For to find a symbol that has lasted,
in one form or another, since the beginning of the world is to learn
that it is something the world itself is built on. It is the picture
book we are given before we can read print. And it means that something
is working out--and is not yet--and the eye of man hath not seen or the
ear of man heard. And about fear--that is the most wonderful of all and
the hardest to tell. It is our friend. At first everything fed upon
everything else; and so it does now,