Some beheld in it the mighty manifestation of a jealous and all-powerful
God, Who holds us in His hand and laughs at our poor glory; the scornful
gesture of a Providence too long neglected and incensed because man does
not recognize with greater docility Its hidden existence nor fathom more
easily Its enigmatic will. Were they mistaken? And who are they that
are never mistaken in the darkness that is over us? But why does this
God, more perfect than men, ask of us what a perfect man would not ask?
Why does He make a too willing, an almost blindly accepted faith the
first, the most necessary and indeed the only virtue? If He is incensed
because He is not understood, because He is disobeyed, would it not be
just that He should manifest Himself in such a manner that human reason,
which He Himself created with its admirable demands, should not have to
surrender the most precious, the most essential of its privileges in
order to approach His throne? Now was this gesture, like so many others,
clear enough, significant enough to force reason to its knees? And yet,
if He loves that man should adore Him, as those who speak in His name
proclaim, it would be easy for Him to constrain us all to adore Him
alone. We only await an unexceptionable sign. In the name of that
direct reflection of His light which He has set at the topmost point of
our being, where burns, with an ardour, with a purity that grow fairer
day by day, the single passion for certainty and truth, does it not seem
that we have a right to it?
V
Others contemplated this King gasping for breath on the steps of the
most splendid throne that still remains standing, this almost infinite
power, shattered, broken, a prey to the dreadful enemies that assail
suffering flesh, flesh destroyed under the most dazzling crown that the
invisible and mocking hand of chance has ever suspended over a confused
heap of anguish and distress....
They saw in it a new and terrifying proof of wretchedness, of human
uselessness. They went about repeating to themselves what the wisdom of
antiquity had already so well said, to wit that we are, that we probably
always shall be, despite all our efforts, "but a grain in the proportion
of substance and but the turning of a wimble in respect of time."
Unbelieving in God, but believing in His shadow, they discovered in
this, perhaps, a mysterious decree of that mysterious Justice which
sometimes comes to place a little order in the shapeless history of men
and to take vengeance on the kings for the iniquity of the nations....
They found in it many other things besides. They were not mistaken; all
those things were there, because they are in ourselves and because the
sense that we give to the incomprehensible actions of unknown forces
soon becomes the sole human reality and peoples with more or less
fraternal spectres the indifference and the nothingness that surround
us.