“Excellent Sergius! Impulsive Sergius!--with big heart, big head and no logic! Prove to me this eternal justice! Where does it begin? In the creation of worlds without end, all doomed to destruction, and therefore perfectly futile in their existence? In the making of man, who lives his little day with the utmost difficulty, pain and struggle, and is then extinguished, to be heard of no more? The use of it, my Sergius!--point out the use of it! No,--there is no man can answer me that! If I could see the Creator, I would ask Him the question personally--but He hides Himself behind the great big pendulum He has set swinging--tick--tock!--tick--tock! Life--Death!--Life--Death!--and never a reason why the clock is set going! And so we shall never have justice,--simply because there is none! It is not just or reasonable to propound a question to which there is no answer; it is not just or reasonable to endow man with all the thinking powers of brain, and all the imaginative movements of mind, merely to turn him into a pinch of dust afterwards. Every generation, every country strives to get justice done, but cannot,--merely for the fact that God Himself has no idea of it, and therefore it is naturally lacking in His creature, man. Our governing-forces are plainly the elements. No Divine finger stops the earthquake from engulfing a village full of harmless inhabitants, simply because of the injustice of such utter destruction! See now!--look at the eyes of Lotys reproaching me! You would think they were the eyes of an angel, gazing at a devil in the sweet hope of plucking him out of hell!” “Such a hope would be vain in your case, Zouche,” said Lotys tranquilly; “You make your own hell, and you must live in it! Nevertheless, in some of the wild things you say, there is a grain of truth. If I were God, I should be the most miserable of all beings, to look upon all the misery I had myself created! I should be so sorry for the world, that I should put an end to all hope of immortality by my own death.” She made this strange remark with a simplicity and wistfulness which were in striking contrast to the awful profundity of the suggestion, and all her auditors, including the half-tipsy Zouche, were silent. “I should be so sorry!” she repeated; “For even as a mortal woman my pity for the suffering world almost breaks my heart;--but if I were God, I should have all the griefs of all the worlds I had made to answer for,--and such an agony would surely kill me. Oh,--the pain, the tears, the mistakes, the sins, the anguish of humanity! All these are frightful to me! I do not understand why such misery should exist! I think it must be that we have not enough love in the world; if we only loved each other faithfully, God might love us more!”