A woman is left a widow to earn a living for herself, and bring up her
children fatherless. She must assume that the Lord had some good purpose
in leaving her thus bereft and must drill herself into waiting on a
Will so impossible to comprehend.

Storms sink ships, drowning passengers and crew; lightning sets fire to
houses and strikes human beings dead; earthquakes swallow up whole
districts destroying industry and human life; tidal waves sweep inland
carrying away towns; and our legal phraseology can think of no better
explanation of such calamity than to ascribe it to "the act of God."

It is needless to multiply these instances. Our own knowledge supplies
them by the score. Our personal lives are full of them. God's Will,
God's Love, God's Mercy, become strangely ironic forces, grim beyond any
open enmity. They remind us of the "love," the "pity," the "mercy," in
which the orthodox sent the heretic to the hangman or the stake,
destroying the body to save the soul.

It is a far cry from this appalling vision of "the Father" to the
psalmist's "Delight thou in the Lord and he shall give thee the desires
of thine heart." How could anyone delight in the Caucasian God, as the
majority of Caucasians conceive of Him? As a matter of fact, how many
Caucasians themselves, however devout, however orthodox, attempt to
delight, or pretend to delight, in the God to whom on occasions they bow
down? Delight is a strong word, and a lovely one; but used of the
Caucasian and his Deity it is not without its elements of humour.



III