"No," said Mr. Britling. "It is the theologians who must answer that. They have been extravagant about God. They have had silly absolute ideas--that He is all powerful. That He's omni-everything. But the common sense of men knows better. Every real religious thought denies it. After all, the real God of the Christians is Christ, not God Almighty; a poor mocked and wounded God nailed on a cross of matter.... Some day He will triumph.... But it is not fair to say that He causes all things now. It is not fair to make out a case against him. You have been misled. It is a theologian's folly. God is not absolute; God is finite.... A finite God who struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way--who is _with_ us--that is the essence of all real religion.... I agree with you so--Why! if I thought there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror of this war--able to prevent these things--doing them to amuse Himself--I would spit in his empty face...." "Any one would...." "But it's your teachers and catechisms have set you against God.... They want to make out He owns all Nature. And all sorts of silly claims. Like the heralds in the Middle Ages who insisted that Christ was certainly a great gentleman entitled to bear arms. But God is within Nature and necessity. Necessity is a thing beyond God--beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a mystery everlastingly impenetrable. God is nearer than that. Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing. Closer He is than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. He is the Other Thing than this world. Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them.... Not yet...." "They always told me He was the maker of Heaven and Earth." "That's the Jew God the Christians took over. It's a Quack God, a Panacea. It's not my God." Letty considered these strange ideas. "I never thought of Him like that," she said at last. "It makes it all seem different." "Nor did I. But I do now.... I have suddenly found it and seen it plain. I see it so plain that I am amazed that I have not always seen it.... It is, you see, so easy to understand that there is a God, and how complex and wonderful and brotherly He is, when one thinks of those dear boys who by the thousand, by the hundred thousand, have laid down their lives.... Ay, and there were German boys too who did the same.... The cruelties, the injustice, the brute aggression--they saw it differently. They laid down their lives--they laid down their lives.... Those dear lives, those lives of hope and sunshine.... "Don't you see that it must be like that, Letty? Don't you see that it must be like that?" "No," she said, "I've seen things differently from that."