d are removed. Go on;
go on! you want but another step. What is to prevent that you should not
shake the universe, and overturn this doom, and break all our bonds?
There is enough here to explode this gray fiction of a firmament, and to
rend those precipices, and to dissolve that waste,--as at the time when
the primeval seas dried up, and those infernal mountains rose.'

He laughed, and the echoes caught the sound and gave it back as if
they mocked it. 'There is enough to rend us all into shreds,' he said,
'and shake, as you say, both heaven and earth, and these plains and
those hills.'

'Then why,' I cried in my haste, with a dreadful hope piercing through my
soul--'why do you create and perfect, but never employ? When we had
armies on the earth, we used them. You have more than armies; you have
force beyond the thoughts of man, but all without use as yet.'

'All,' he cried, 'for no use! All in vain!--in vain!'

'O master!' I said, 'great and more great in time to come, why?--why?'

He took me by the arm and drew me close.

'Have you strength,' he said, 'to bear it if I tell you why?'

I knew what he was about to say. I felt it in the quivering of my veins,
and my heart that bounded as if it would escape from my breast; but I
would not quail from what he did not shrink to utter. I could speak no
word, but I looked him in the face and waited--for that which was more
terrible than all.

He held me by the arm, as if he would hold me up when the shock of
anguish came. 'They are in vain,' he said, 'in vain--because God rules
over all.'

His arm was strong; but I fell at his feet like a dead man.

How miserable is that image, and how unfit to use! Death is still and
cool and sweet. There is nothing in it that pierces like a sword, that
burns like fire, that rends and tears like the turning wheels. O life, O
pain, O terrible name of God in which is all succor and all torment!
What are pangs and tortures to that, which ever increases in its awful
power, and has no limit nor any alleviation, but whenever it is spoken
penetrates through and through the miserable soul? O God, whom once I
called my Father! O Thou who gavest me being, against whom I have fought,
whom I fight to the end, shall there never be anything but anguish in the
sound of Thy great name?

When I returned to such command of myself as one can have who has been
transfixed by that sword of fire, the master stood by me still. He had
not fallen like me,