. . .
Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This
brings me to God."
"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.
"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so
long as we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an
Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place.
There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast
universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be
extinguished to-morrow. There can be no courage beyond social
courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us
the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a multitude of
meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I defied
God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions and
pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from
my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the
nursemaids of mankind. But there is another God than that God of
obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from
home and country, God scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in
a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a
sword.
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