God might be, as the Church said,
a Substance, but He could not be a Person.
With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and
stopped for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new
world; for the fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the
world, which he thought real, mimic and reproduce the distorted
nightmare of his personal horror. He did not yet know it, and he
was twenty years in finding it out; but he had need of all the
beauty of the Lake below and of the Alps above, to restore the
finite to its place. For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc
for a moment looked to him what it was -- a chaos of anarchic and
purposeless forces -- and he needed days of repose to see it
clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white
purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity
of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful
beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but
man became chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were
wholly restored, the illusions of Europe suddenly vanished,
leaving a new world to learn.
On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one
might have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal
with the chaos.
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