The theology she had attempted to defend was so faulty, so unfair to God, that Faber’s atheism had an advantage over it as easy as it was great.  His unbelief was less selfish than Juliet’s faith; consequently her faith sank, as her conscience rose meeting what was true in Faber’s utterances.  How could it be otherwise when she opposed lies uttered for the truth, to truths uttered for the lie? the truth itself she had never been true enough to look in the face.  As her arguments, yea the very things she argued for, went down before him, her faith, which, to be faith, should have been in the living source of all true argument, found no object, was swept away like the uprooted weed it was, and whelmed in returning chaos.

“If such is your God,” he said, “I do Him a favor in denying His existence, for His very being would be a disgrace to Himself.  At times, as I go my rounds, and think of the horrors of misery and suffering before me, I feel as if I were out on a campaign against an Evil supreme, the Author of them all.  But when I reflect that He must then actually create from very joy in the infliction and sight of agony, I am ashamed of my foolish and cruel, though but momentary imagination, and—­’There can be no such being!’ I say.  “I but labor in a region of inexorable law, blind as Justice herself; law that works for good in the main, and whose carelessness of individual suffering it is for me, and all who know in any way how, to supplement with the individual care of man for his fellow-men, who, either from Nature’s own necessity, or by neglect or violation of her laws, find themselves in a sea of troubles.”  For Nature herself, to the man who will work in harmony with her, affords the means of alleviation, of restoration even—­who knows if not of something better still?—­the means, that is, of encountering the ills that result from the breach of her own laws; and the best the man who would help his fellows can do, is to search after and find such other laws, whose applied operation will restore the general conduction, and render life after all an endurable, if not a desirable thing.”

“But you can do nothing with death,” said Juliet.

“Nothing—­yet—­alas!”

“Is death a law, or a breach of law, then?” she asked.

“That is a question I can not answer.”

“In any case, were it not better to let the race die out, instead of laboriously piecing and patching at a too old garment, and so leave room for a new race to come up, which the fruit of experience, both sweet and bitter, left behind in books, might enable to avoid like ruin?”

“Ages before they were able to read our books, they would have broken the same laws, found the same evils, and be as far as we are now beyond the help of foregone experiences:  they would have the experience itself, of whose essence it is, that it is still too late.”

“Then would not the kindest thing be to poison the race—­as men on the prairies meet fire with fire—­and so with death foil Death and have done with dying?”