Page:The Soul of a Bishop.djvu/208

196 a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the world was the "White man's Burthen"; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless—those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking Titan Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.

And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.

Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....

Was there any other way?

It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training of all his life. "Could it be possible that after all our old German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies—and not God at all?"

For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that gathered in the young attaché's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for "Light. More Light!"...