If the God would but
hear him, it was all he had yet learned to require of his Godhood.
And that must ever be the first thing to require. More demands
would come, and greater answers he would find. But now--if God
would but hear him! If he spoke to him but one kind word, it would
be the very soul of comfort; he could no more be lonely. A fountain
of glad imaginations gushed up in his heart at the thought. What
if, from the cold winter of his life, he had but to open the door of
his garret-room, and, kneeling by the bare bedstead, enter into the
summer of God's presence! What if God spoke to him face to face!
He had so spoken to Moses. He sought him from no fear of the
future, but from present desolation; and if God came near to him, it
would not be with storm and tempest, but with the voice of a friend.
And surely, if there was a God at all, that is, not a power greater
than man, but a power by whose power man was, he must hear the voice
of the creature whom he had made, a voice that came crying out of
the very need which he had created. Younger people than Robert are
capable of such divine metaphysics. Hence he continued to disappear
from his grandmother's parlour at much the same hour as before. In
the cold, desolate garret, he knelt and cried out into that which
lay beyond the thought that cried, the unknowable infinite, after
the God that may be known as surely as a little child knows his
mysterious mother.
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