So it is better not. I
would not be fooled. To believe the false and be happy is the very
belly of misery. To believe the true and be miserable, is to be
true--and miserable. If there is no God, let me know it. I will
not be fooled. I will not believe in a God that does not exist.
Better be miserable because I am, and cannot help it.--O God!'
Yet in his misery, he cried upon God.
These words came upon Robert with such a shock of sympathy, that
they destroyed his consciousness for the moment, and when he thought
about them, he almost doubted if he had heard them. He rose and
approached the bed. Ericson lay with his eyes closed, and his face
contorted as by inward pain. Robert put a spoonful of wine to his
lips. He swallowed it, opened his eyes, gazed at the boy as if he
did not know him, closed them again, and lay still.
Some people take comfort from the true eyes of a dog--and a precious
thing to the loving heart is the love of even a dumb animal.6 What
comfort then must not such a boy as Robert have been to such a man
as Ericson! Often and often when he was lying asleep as Robert
thought, he was watching the face of his watcher. When the human
soul is not yet able to receive the vision of the God-man, God
sometimes--might I not say always?--reveals himself, or at least
gives himself, in some human being whose face, whose hands are the
ministering angels of his unacknowledged presence, to keep alive the
fire of love on the altar of the heart, until God hath provided the
sacrifice--that is, until the soul is strong enough to draw it from
the concealing thicket.
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