The equality of all these human spots that appear in the somber gleams of storm, why—­it is a revelation!  It is a beginning of distinct order in Chaos.  How comes it that I have never seen what is so visible, how comes it that I never perceived that obvious thing—­that a man and another man are the same thing, everywhere and always?  I rejoice that I have seen it as if my destiny were to shed a little light on us and on our road.

* * * * * *

The bells are summoning our eyes to the church.  It is surrounded by scaffolding, and a long swarm of people are gliding towards it, grouping round it, going in.

The earth and the sky—­but I do not see God.  I see everywhere, everywhere, God’s absence.  My gaze goes through space and returns, forsaken.  And I have never seen Him, and He is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.

No one ever saw Him.  I know—­I always knew, for that matter!—­that there is no proof of God’s existence, and that you must find, first of all, believe in it if you want to prove it.  Where does He show Himself?  What does He save?  What tortures of the heart, what disasters does He turn aside from all and each in the ruin of hearts?  Where have we known or handled or embraced anything but His name?  God’s absence surrounds infinitely and even actually each kneeling suppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seeker who bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; it surrounds the spiteful antagonism of all religions, armed against each other, enormous and bloody.  God’s absence rises like the sky over the agonizing conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity—­still haunting me—­of the cemeteries of agony, the charnel heaps of innocent soldiers, the heavy cries of the shipwrecked.  Absence!  Absence!  In the hundred thousand years that life has tried to delay death there has been nothing on earth more fruitless than man’s cries to divinity, nothing which gives so perfect an idea of silence.

How does it come about that I have lasted till now without understanding that I did not see God?  I believed because they had told me to believe.  It seems to me that I am able to believe something no longer because they command me to, and I feel myself set free.

I lean on the stones of the low wall, at the spot where I leaned of old, in the time when I thought I was some one and knew something.

My looks fall on the families and the single figures which are hurrying towards the black hole of the church porch, towards the gloom of the nave, where one is enlaced in incense, where wheels of light and angels of color hover under the vaults which contain a little of the great emptiness of the heavens.

I seem to stoop nearer to those people, and I get glimpses of certain profundities among the fleeting pictures which my sight lends me.  I seem to have stopped, at random, in front of the richness of a single being.  I think of the “humble, quiet lives,” and it appears to me within a few words, and that in what they call a “quiet, lowly life,” there are immense expectations and waitings and weariness.