nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon their
steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light. This being so, dear
pastor, let us reason together.

"You do not believe in God? Why? God, to your thinking, is
incomprehensible, inexplicable. Agreed. I will not reply that to
comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you
that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the
right to affirm that which to me is believable. There is, for you, one
evident fact, which lies within yourself. In you, Matter has ended in
intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will end
in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? God may seem to you
incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in
all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman. Why
should His craft stop short at man, His most finished creation?

"If that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation.
Happily, although you deny God, you are obliged, in order to establish
your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your
arguments as much as your arguments kill God. We have also admitted
that Matter and Spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each
other; that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to
which the finite material world has given rise; that if no one on
earth is able to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the
great-whole of terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to
the knowledge of the relations which the spirit perceives between
these creations.

"We might end the argument here in one word, by denying you the
faculty of comprehending God, just as you deny to the pebbles of the