Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/52

30 heard of a magnificent capital suddenly smitten—churches, houses, towers, falling with a crash—the bursting land vomiting flames and smoke—and sixty thousand souls perishing in an instant—shook his faith in the beneficence of Providence. "God, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth," he says, "whom the first article of our creed declared to be so wise and benignant, had not displayed paternal care in thus consigning both the just and the unjust to the same destruction. In vain my young mind strove to resist these impressions. It was impossible; the more so as the wise and religious themselves could not agree upon the view to be taken of the event."

At this very time Voltaire was agitating the same doubts.

"Direz-vous, en voyant cet amas de victimes:

Dieu s'est vengé, leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfans

Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglans?

Lisbonne qui n'est plus, eût-elle plus de vices

Que Londres, que Paris, plougés dans les délices?

Lisbonne est abîmée; et l'on danse à Paris."

We are not, however, to suppose that the child rushed hastily to such a conclusion. He debated it in his own mind as he heard it debated around him. Bettina records that on his coming one day from church, where he had listened to a sermon on the subject, in which God's goodness was justified, his father asked him what impression the sermon had made. "Why," said he, "it may after all be a much simpler matter than the clergyman thinks; God knows very well that an immortal soul can receive no injury from a mortal accident."

Doubts once raised would of course recur, and the child began to settle into a serious disbelief in the benignity of Providence, learning to consider God as the