the greatest of sins?

The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends,
not his masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which
he believed, and he spoke for them, for what he believed to be the
truth, so far as man had learned it. The conference lasted through
that short winter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed
that he was full of many confusing voices: the voices of the new
science, the voices of the new doubt. One voice only had fallen
silent in him: the voice of the old faith.

It had grown late. Twilight was descending on the white campus, on
the snow-capped town. Away in the west, beyond the clustered house-
tops, there had formed itself the solemn picture of a red winter
sunset. The light entered the windows and fell on the lad's face.
One last question had just been asked him by the most venerable and
beloved of his professors--in tones awe-stricken, and tremulous
with his own humility, and with compassion for the erring boy
before him,--

"Do you not even believe in God?"

Ah, that question! which shuts the gates of consciousness upon us
when we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we
waken; which was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest
to life in us as life itself ebbs fastest. That question which
exacts of the finite to affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite,
that prodding of the evening midge for its opinion of the polar
star.