"Concubinage is a regular thing in Spain," went on the other suavely. "In France they're very dubious about the Pope. In England, below the surface, they are as disunited pretty nearly as we are. In South America, the people would have more religion if they were still heathen." Paul recalled, in a swift flood of memory, his meeting with Father Kenelm at Cambridge. He recalled his stories of immense adoring crowds, of persecution willingly endured, of heroic self-sacrifices for the propagation of the faith. Still more he remembered how the father, eagerly talking to him, had seemed to take it for granted that he was a Catholic; and how he, feeling that he must be honest, had said he was not; and how instantly, across the crowded drawing-room, without a trace of nervousness or any sense of indecorum, the sudden stab of the poignant question had flashed--"Oh, but Mr. Kestern, surely you love our Lord?" Would such a man condone immorality? The boy's face hardened. "There was an Iscariot among the Apostles, Bishop," he said. "Yes, one. Not eleven out of twelve." The train began to slow down, and the Bishop stirred to gather his traps. "My lord," said Paul, curt in his ardour, "you merely propound a dilemma. Either the Holy Ghost has kept silence as to the essential central authority of the Church till He showed it to Anglo-Catholics seventy years ago, the devil triumphing meanwhile, or--or----" "Eh?" queried the astonished Bishop. "Or it is all a lie." CHAPTER VI MOUNT CARMEL Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.--ISA. xlv. Then Job answered and said: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him."--JOB xxiii. There is no proof of God's existence, and you must 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 pitiful antagonism of all religions, armed against each other, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over the agonising conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity--still haunting me--of the cemeteries of agony, the charnal-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.--HENRI BARBUSSE: Light (translated by Fitzwater Wray). (1)