ace and
kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.

"Tell me," he whispered, "are you God?"

"I am the Angel of God."

The bishop thought over that for some moments.

"I want," he said, "to know about God.

"I want," he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, "to know about
God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
was God."

He paused. "Tell me," said the friend at his side; "tell me."

"It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
in an unknown tongue.

"You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
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