‘No, [only] fragments by nobodies, inconsistent versions. If God gave a perfect Man, He could not be for an age, but for all time, and how if His life passed, and we have no writing, only untrustworthy accounts? Surely, then, the life was worthless which God did not care to save for us. He stored up coal and light, our physical life, but He cared not to preserve Jesus, the spiritual life, He who had been called the Light of the world. Then it must be a delusion that He was, and God has deceived us, and we were deceived. The Pharisees were right in testing His claims. They watched Him on the Cross and there bade Him cry to the God Whom He had claimed as Father,—and He cried as the fabled prophet of old, Eli! Eli! and God disowned Him, and the words followed which proved that He was forsaken, that the thirst of soul was unappeased and His life was indeed over. And so the darkness gathered round the Cross, ever darkening as I listened to the cry. Was God indeed mocking our hopes? The old pagan vision rose before me. The symbols of the Christ were confounded with grotesque forms. I could not utter the Creeds of the Church. Yet strange to say I yet clung to a consciousness of a Father of the visible. In my troubled dreams, which haunted me day and night, I still seemed to feel there was a God, though no voice was heard for me among the trees of the garden.[50] ‘I said I will not give up my trust in God, I must reconstruct. I will not, as some who have lost faith in Christ and the eternal, give away the trust in a Father. This I thought would survive without, but with that (my faith in Christ) went all belief in the existence of any other. As I listened to the voice of creation unharmonised by the interpretation of generous love proceeding from the soul, it seemed simply horrible: the martyr slowly consuming in the fire, God looking on, refusing to interfere with natural causes. I had seen this before, but, as in that beautiful parable of the Septuagint, I had seen God was with him, and the joy overpowered the pain, and the true life was purified, and they thanked God in the fires. Now I saw no immortal hope, no resurrection; all was dark horror and amazement. No; could I keep belief in a God who had deceived mankind? Should I trust Him, pray “to Him”?[51]