Such a loss as mine passes over the soul like a plough cleaving a pasture line by line.  The true stuff of the spirit is revealed and laid out in all its bareness.  That customary outline, that surface growth of herb and blade, is all pared away.  I have been accustomed to think myself a religious man—­I have never been without the sense of God over and about me.  But when an experience like this comes, it shows me what my religion is worth.  I do not turn to God in love and hope; I do not know Him, I do not understand Him.  I feel that He must have forgotten me, or that He is indifferent to me, or that He is incapable of love, and works blindly and sternly.  My reason in vain says that the great and beautiful gift itself of the child’s life and the child’s love came from Him.  I do not question His power or His right to take my child from me.  But I endure only because I must, not willingly or loyally or lovingly.  It is not that I feel the injustice of His taking the boy away; it is a far deeper sense of injustice than that.  The injustice lies in the fact that He made the child so utterly dear and desired; that He set him so firmly in my heart; this on the one hand; and on the other, that He does not, if He must rend the little life away and leave the bleeding gap, send at the same time some love, some strength, some patience to make the pain bearable.  I cannot believe that the love I bore my boy was anything but a sweet and holy influence.  It gave me the one thing of which I am in hourly need—­ something outside of myself and my own interests, to love better than I loved even myself.  It seems indeed a pure and simple loss, unless the lesson God would have us learn is the stoical lesson of detachment, indifference, cold self-sufficiency.  It is like taking the crutches away from a lame man, knocking the props away from a tottering building.  An optimistic moralist would say that I loved Alec too selfishly, and even that the love of the child turned away my heart from the jealous Heart of God, who demands a perfect surrender, a perfect love.  But how can one love that which one does not know or understand, a Power that walks in darkness and that gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and desirable things, and on the other strikes them from us when we need them most?  It is not as if I did not desire to trust and love God utterly.  I should think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it gave me a pure and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God.  But instead of that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful resistance.  I do not feel that there is anything which God could send me or reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or injustice.  I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and love Him when I do not.  He may crush me with repeated blows of His hand, but He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing, of balancing; and I must use it even in His despite.  He does not require,