Читать книгу Australian Essays онлайн

29 страница из 38

Let us leave the rest with God—God whose “dealings with us” are unfathomable, God who is “fathomless.” Thus he achieves his resignation. But he never blinds himself to things; he never answers “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod” (as Heine says). This world is a

“world of rapine and wrong,

where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey

for the resolute and the strong.”

Sometimes there rises in him the

“wail of discordant sadness for the wrongs he never can right,”

for the brothers, and ah for the sisters, he cannot help. But sometimes, also, he bursts forth into “a song of gladness, a pæan of joyous might.” Both are in him: the wail for the lost Lord and the thanksgiving to God for his “glorious oxygen.” (The capitals are his own.) With the first, we have done: let us look at the second and see what he has to show us of living and loving, of action and women, and then see what he has to show us of life as a whole, “the conclusion of the whole matter.”