Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/102

100 The physician then informed him of the many men and women who have died of cancer. A large number of these individuals had reached a period in life where they could just afford to relax from their struggles for mere sustenance; men and women who had reached a calm lake after journeying through troubled and tortuous waters; who had fought the "good fight," and had won the just reward of resting after their labors. But no, the Lord must trouble them for their sins.

A group of these sufferers is shown to the Martian, and the normal course of this disease is explained. This time all he can do is to protest that he firmly asserts that not one of our savage chiefs, even were he of the most primitive tribe, of the cruelest imagination, of the most base and insane nature, would nor could conceive of such torture as the Loving Father conceived when he decided upon cancer as a visitation for our sins. The roasting of a witch alive is but a mere trifle compared to the long-drawn-out agony, the slow wasting, the anguish of a cancer patient watching himself sink to death. And when death mercifully releases this sufferer from his hellish torture the preacher murmurs, "Lord, thy will be done."

The Martian talks for a few moments with a sufferer from this disease and ascertains that the latter is a devout and true religionist, that he has been a good, moral church-goer, and has lived strictly according to the tenets of his creed, that he firmly and passionately believes that he has lived so that he will merit the reward of heaven, an everlasting sojourn in a land where there is no pain and suffering. And yet, this devout religionist, when he was informed that he had an incurable cancer, traveled the length and breadth of his land, from one surgeon to another, allowing himself to be cut to pieces, in order that he might remain on this earth.