For where was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life--not even among the dogs--outside with bare nothingness--cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had _come_! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished for his overconfidence--for his presumption! There was no presumption in the matter; there was only ignorance. He had not learned--nor has any one learned more than in part--what awful possibilities lie in the existence we call _we_. He had but spoken from what he knew--that hitherto life for him had seemed inseparable from prayer to his Father. And was it separable? Surely not. He could not pray, true--but neither was he alive. To live, one must chose to live. He was dead with a death that was heavy upon him. There is a far worse death--the death that is content and suffers nothing; but annihilation is not death--is nothing like it. Cosmo’s condition had no evil in it--only a ghastly imperfection--an abyssmal lack--an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life, he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite of that look, seeming ever to assert that God has nothing to do with them, God has his own way--the best, the only, the live way, of being in everything, and taking his own pure, saving will in them; and now for a season Cosmo had fallen in the fight, and God seemed gone, and _things_ rushed in upon him and overwhelmed him. It was death. He did not yet know it--but it was not the loss of Joan, but the seeming loss of his God, that hollowed the last depth of his misery. But that is of all things the surest to pass; for God changing not, his life must destroy every false show of him. Cosmo was now one of those holy children who are bound hand and foot in the furnace, until the fire shall have consumed their bonds that they may pace their prison. Stifled with the smoke and the glow, he must yet for a time lie helpless; not yet could he lift up his voice and call upon the ice and the cold, the frost and the snow to bless the Lord, to praise and exalt him forever. But God was not far from him. Feelings are not scientific instruments for that which surrounds them; they but speak of themselves when they say, “I am cold; I am dark.” Perhaps the final perfection will be when our faith is utterly and absolutely independent of our feelings. I dare to imagine this the final victory of our Lord, when he followed the cry of _Why hast thou forsaken me?_ with the words, _Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit_.