ummoning our eyes to the church. It is surrounded by
scaffolding, and a long swarm of people are gliding towards it,
grouping round it, going in.

The earth and the sky--but I do not see God. I see everywhere,
everywhere, God's absence. My gaze goes through space and returns,
forsaken. And I have never seen Him, and He is nowhere, nowhere,
nowhere.

No one ever saw Him. I know--I always knew, for that matter!--that
there is no proof of God's existence, and that you must find, first of
all, believe in it if you want to prove it. Where does He show
Himself? What does He save? What tortures of the heart, what
disasters does He turn aside from all and each in the ruin of hearts?
Where have we known or handled or embraced anything but His name?
God's absence surrounds infinitely and even actually each kneeling
suppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seeker
who bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; it
surrounds the spiteful antagonism of all religions, armed against each
other, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over the
agonizing conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling
heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity--still haunting me--of
the cemeteries of agony, the charnel heaps of innocent soldiers, the
heavy cries of the shipwrecked. Absence! Absence! In the hundred
thousand years that life has tried to delay death there has been
nothing on earth more fruitless than man's cries to divinity, nothing
which gives so perfect an idea of silence.

How does it come about that I have lasted till now without
understanding that I did not see God? I believed because they had told
me to believe. It seems to me that I am able to believe something no
longer because they command me to, and I feel myself set free.

I lean on the stones of the low wall, at the spot where I leaned of
old, in the time when I thought I was some one and knew something.

My looks fall on the families and the single figures which are hurrying
towards the black hole of the church porch, towards the gloom of the
nave, where one is enlaced in incense, where wheels of light and angels
of color hover under the vaults which contain a little of the great
emptiness of the heavens.

I seem to stoop nearer to those people, and I get glimpses of certain
profundities among the fleeting pictures which my sight lends me. I
seem to have stopped, at random, in front of the richn