more honest a man is, the less can he accept it. That the
honest man, however, should not thereupon set himself to see whether
there might not be a true God notwithstanding, whether such a God was
not conceivable consistently with things as they are, whether the
believers had not distorted the revelation they professed to follow;
especially that he should prefer to believe in some sort of _vitalic_
machine, equally void of beneficence and malevolence, existing because
it can not help it, and giving birth to all sorts of creatures, men and
women included, because it can not help it--must arise from a condition
of being, call it spiritual, moral, or mental--I can not be obliging
enough to add _cerebral,_ because so I should nullify my conclusion,
seeing there would be no substance left wherein it could be wrought
out--for which the man, I can not but think, will one day discover that
he was to blame--for which a living God sees that he is to blame, makes
all the excuse he can, and will give the needful punishment to the
uttermost lash.

There are some again, to whom the idea of a God perfect as they could
imagine Him in love and devotion and truth, seems, they say, too good to
be true: such have not yet perceived that no God any thing less than
absolutely glorious in loveliness would be worth believing in, or such
as the human soul could believe in. But Faber did not belong to this
class--still less to that portion of it whose inconsolable grief over
the lack of such a God may any day blossom into hope of finding Him. He
was in practice at one with that portion of it who, accepting things at
their worst, find alleviation for their sorrows in the strenuous effort
to make the best of them; but he sought to content himself with the
order of things which, blind and deaf and non-willing, he said had
existed for evermore, most likely--the thing was hardly worth
discussing; blind, for we can not see that it sees; deaf, for we can not
hear that it hears; and without will, for we see no strife, purpose, or
change in its going!

There was no God, then, and people would be more comfortable to know it.
In any case, as there was none, they ought to know it. As to his
certainty of there being none, Faber felt no desire to find one, had met
with no proof that there was one, and had reasons for supposing that
there was none. He had not searched very long or very wide, or with any
eager desire to discover Him, if indeed there should be