"God is God," he
whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
beyond the needs of common living.
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