After a time, however, I grew unaccountably weary of the vehemence of Henry Moore and of the adroit helper who hawked his books.  And suddenly I looked up into the clear noon blue of the ancient sky.  A pigeon was flying across the wide open spaces of the square, the sunlight glinting on its wings.  I saw the quiet green tops of the trees in the park, and the statue of Roscoe Conkling, turning a nonchalant shoulder toward the heated speaker who said there was no God.  How many strange ideas, contradictory arguments, curious logic, have fallen, this last quarter century, upon the stony ears of Roscoe Conkling!  Far above me the Metropolitan tower, that wonder work of men, lifted itself grandly to the heavens, and all about I suddenly heard and felt the roar and surge of the mighty city, the mighty, careless, busy city, thousands of people stirring about me, souls full of hot hopes and mad desires, unsatisfied longings, unrealized ideals.  And I stepped out of the group who were gathered around the man who said there was no God....

But I still drifted in the eddy, thinking how wonderful and strange all these things were, and came thus to another group, close gathered at the curb.  It was much smaller than the other, and at the centre stood a patriarchal man with a white beard, and with him two women.  He was leaning against the iron railing of the park, and several of the free-thinker’s audience, freshly stuffed with arguments, had engaged him hotly.  Just as I approached he drew from his pocket a worn, leather-covered Bible, and said, tapping it with one finger: 

“For forty years I have carried this book with me.  It contains more wisdom than any other book in the world.  Your friend there can talk until he is hoarse—­it will do no harm—­but the world will continue to follow the wisdom of this book.”

A kind of exaltation gleamed in his eye, and he spoke with an earnestness equal to that of Henry Moore.  He, too, was a street speaker, waiting with his box at his side to begin.  He would soon be standing up there to prove, also with logic and authority, that there was a God.  He, also, would plough that knobby black soil of human heads with the share of his vehement faith.  The two women were with him to sing their belief, and one had a basket to take up a collection, and the other, singling me out as I listened with eagerness, gave me a printed tract, a kind of advertisement of God.

I looked at the title of it.  It was called:  “God in His World.”

“Does this prove that God is really in the world?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.  “Will you read it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am glad to get it.  It is wonderful that so great a truth can he established in so small a pamphlet, and all for nothing.”

She looked at me curiously, I thought, and I put the tract by the side of the pamphlet I had bought from the freethinker, and drifted again in the eddy.