Some beheld in it the mighty manifestation of a jealous and all-powerful God, Who holds us in His hand and laughs at our poor glory; the scornful gesture of a Providence too long neglected and incensed because man does not recognize with greater docility Its hidden existence nor fathom more easily Its enigmatic will. Were they mistaken? And who are they that are never mistaken in the darkness that is over us? But why does this God, more perfect than men, ask of us what a perfect man would not ask? Why does He make a too willing, an almost blindly accepted faith the first, the most necessary and indeed the only virtue? If He is incensed because He is not understood, because He is disobeyed, would it not be just that He should manifest Himself in such a manner that human reason, which He Himself created with its admirable demands, should not have to surrender the most precious, the most essential of its privileges in order to approach His throne? Now was this gesture, like so many others, clear enough, significant enough to force reason to its knees? And yet, if He loves that man should adore Him, as those who speak in His name proclaim, it would be easy for Him to constrain us all to adore Him alone. We only await an unexceptionable sign. In the name of that direct reflection of His light which He has set at the topmost point of our being, where burns, with an ardour, with a purity that grow fairer day by day, the single passion for certainty and truth, does it not seem that we have a right to it?
Others contemplated this King gasping for breath on the steps of the most splendid throne that still remains standing, this almost infinite power, shattered, broken, a prey to the dreadful enemies that assail suffering flesh, flesh destroyed under the most dazzling crown that the invisible and mocking hand of chance has ever suspended over a confused heap of anguish and distress....
They saw in it a new and terrifying proof of wretchedness, of human uselessness. They went about repeating to themselves what the wisdom of antiquity had already so well said, to wit that we are, that we probably always shall be, despite all our efforts, "but a grain in the proportion of substance and but the turning of a wimble in respect of time." Unbelieving in God, but believing in His shadow, they discovered in this, perhaps, a mysterious decree of that mysterious Justice which sometimes comes to place a little order in the shapeless history of men and to take vengeance on the kings for the iniquity of the nations....