se.

If ever, in our tearful, joyful ecstasy, the poor, sleepy, half-dead
devil should raise his head, we laugh at him. It is not his hour now.

"If there should be a hell, after all!" he mutters. "If your God should
be cruel! If there should be no God! If you should find out it is all
imagination! If--"

We laugh at him. When a man sits in the warm sunshine, do you ask him
for proof of it? He feels--that is all. And we feel--that is all. We
want no proof of our God. We feel, we feel!

We do not believe in our God because the Bible tells us of Him. We
believe in the Bible because He tells us of it. We feel Him, we feel
Him, we feel--that is all! And the poor, half-swamped devil mutters:

"But if the day should come when you do not feel?"

And we laugh and cry him down.

"It will never come--never," and the poor devil slinks to sleep again,
with his tail between his legs. Fierce assertion many times repeated is
hard to stand against; only time separates the truth from the lie. So we
dream on.

One day we go with our father to town, to church. The townspeople rustle
in their silks, and the men in their sleek cloth, and settle themselves
in their pews, and the light shines in through the windows on the
artificial flowers in the women's bonnets. We have the same miserable
feeling that we have in a shop where all the clerks are very smart. We
wish our father hadn't brought us to town, and we were out on the
karoo. Then the man in the pulpit begins to preach. His text is "He that
believeth not shall be damned."

The day before the magistrate's clerk, who was an atheist, has died in
the street struck by lightning.

The man in the pulpit mentions no name; but he talks of "The hand of God
made visible amongst us." He tells us how, when the white stroke fell,
quivering and naked, the soul fled, robbed of his earthly filament, and
lay at the footstool of God; how over its head has been poured out the
wrath of the Mighty One, whose existence it has denied; and, quivering
and terrified, it has fled to the everlasting shade.

We, as we listen, half start up; every drop of blood in our body has
rushed to our head. He lies! he lies! he lies! That man in the pulpit
lies! Will no one stop him? Have none of them heard--do none of them
know, that when the poor, dark soul shut its eyes on earth it opened
them in the still light of heaven? that there is no wrath where God's
face is? that if one could once creep to the footstool