Francis passed through the very blackest hours of all after that. He prayed to his God but was not comforted; his mind would run only in the harshest channels of the faith he had spent his life in teaching. The God he found was a jealous God, a God of cruelty and vengeance and punishment. In vain he told himself that this was the just visitation of sins. He could not believe it. All his spirit craved for the belief in mercy, the living eternity, the life everlasting. He was hemmed in by the habit of years, and long familiarity with things sacred, all the vocabulary of paradox that had flowed so easily from his lips week in, week out, year after year. He wanted the truth of it, but it was all words, words, words, a rain of fine dust falling upon his intelligence, blinding his eyes. He needed that in his religion which could square with and illuminate the facts of his existence, but ever the darkness grew more impenetrable. For three weeks he went on mechanically with his work, going blindly through the ritual which he had fought so hard to establish, but always when he came to the Benediction and commended the congregation to the Peace of God, he knew, could not away with the knowledge, that there was no peace in his own heart, and he rebuked himself and called himself Hypocrite. He could not take refuge in self-torment. His need was too great. He told himself that he no longer believed, and prayed for help in his unbelief. But there had always been faith in him. Nothing had ever shaken it. His necessity lay in the fact that the symbols he had always used were cheapened, worn, debased. His mind could not change. It was definitely cast in the story of the Godhead in Man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin birth, persecuted and slain by the Jews to rise again in glory to the eternal salvation of souls. . . . The teaching of this gospel should, if it had any purpose, lead to noble life, a superb preparation for eternity. But whither had it led himself? To the smallest of small lives, to the ruin of two of his children, fallen into the very snares against which they had been warned with all the threats of eternal punishment and Hell fire at the command of an appointed minister of the Christian religion. . . . He tried to look beyond his own family, to see what effect the Gospel had had upon his parishioners and he could not disguise from himself the pitifulness of their condition. To consider the effect of the Christian religion upon the history of the world was too large an undertaking for him. Serge had said that he was of those who believe that understanding is not vouchsafed to us. What did he mean? . . . Words haunted him:--"To justify the works of Man to God," or was it "To justify the works of God to Man"? Surely the last. The works of Man could not be justified. He felt himself to be near the clue he was seeking, but the effort to follow it was beyond him. For him the only tie between Man and God was Jesus Christ.