IN THE UPPER sky, lamped by science, the night forgets itself, while in the underground gloom lean hunger and bloated voracity crash against each other till the earth begins to tremble and the pillars of triumph are perilously cracked, swaying on the brink of gaping gulfs. Do not howl in fear or angrily judge God, let the swelling evil burst itself in pain and vomit out its accumulated filth. When the victims of a carnivorous rage are dragged by the competition of ravenous fangs, let the hideousness of the blood-soaked blasphemy arouse divine anger heralding a heroic peace out of an awful retribution. They throng in the church in a primitive frenzy of faith made keen by fear which hopes to flatter their God into a complacent mood into a feebleness of leniency. They feel half sure that peace will be brought down into this demented earth by the mere volume of their wailing uttered in sacred text. They have confidence in their indulgent God who may send them timely wisdom to divert all sacrifices needed for the worship towards the less strong, leaving their own soiled hoardings undivided. But let us hope, for the sake of the dignity of moral justice in this world, that God will never suffer to be cheated of His due by the miserly manipulation of a diplomatic piety carefully avoiding all cost to itself, that a terrible penance may have to be passed through to its ultimate end, leaving no remnant of poison in a treacherously healing scar.
THE BEGGAR IN me lifted his lean hands to the starless sky and cried into night's ear with his hungry voice. His prayers were to the blind Darkness who lay like a fallen god in a desolate heaven of lost hopes. The cry of desire eddied round a chasm of despair, a wailing bird circling its empty nest. But when morning dropped anchor at the rim of the East, the beggar m me leapt and cried: 'Blessed am I that the deaf night denied me-that its coffer was empty.' He cried, 'O Life, O Light, you are precious! and precious is the joy that at last has known you!'
