Never! Never! What a staggering blow that was! Never? Intolerable thought! What, could it be after all that that bone was as old as they had said? Ugh! The excitement of the day and want of sleep at night had been too much for him. He was wholly worn out, exhausted. It was not fair to tax nature thus. It was not just to himself to sit up all night, and then face such awful questions in the cheerless dawn. It was not fair. No one could blame him for being a little shocked and shaken. It was only a shock or a shake, and he would laugh at it as soon he had had rest and quiet. But for the one moment it had lasted, the shock, the shake--call it what you will--was terrible to bear. All at once had glanced in upon him Doubt, the most repellent spectre he had ever yet seen. What! could any mere man dare to impugn the verdict of a hundred generations? From century to century, men of various creeds and forms of worship had crowded around the summit of that little hill. Now, almost within his own lifetime, a set of men had arisen who, unlike the cynics and scoffers of old, undertook to prove, out of God's own earth, the absence of a Guiding Spirit, an Omnipotent Ruler! Now that religion had reached a degree of purity and elevation never touched before, were we to sit still, and hear calm, bland, unaggressive men professing to show beyond doubt that there was no ascertainable reason for believing the greatest theory man had cherished? It was a nightmare, a blasphemous jest. There was the cold winter dawn breaking silently over the vastest city of all the world. How small each individual man looked amid the millions now swarming at the foot of that great cathedral! How infinitesimally little looked individual man under that dome of cloud! Nothing short of the eye of Omnipotence could distinguish individual man on this insignificant planet spinning round one sun out of millions squandered in the unfathomable realms of space! And yet this miserable parasite of earth, man, had dared to raise up his head and declare his ability to prove out of the works of Omnipotence that no such power existed! Which was this, insolence beyond endurance, or insanity beyond cure? Osborne went to the window and looked out. A cold chill struck through him. He shuddered, leaned feebly against the window-frame, and gazed upon the plain of roofs stretched beneath him.