HE Reigns
“Who makest me?” she cried to the sky. “Reveal thyself! Who art thou?”
The heavens remained dumb.
She again cried, “Who hast made me? Who?—Thy image is tainted!”
Visions of angels appeared in the sky. “You have a question for us?” they asked.
“Yes, what sort of God made me to suffer and toil in this sad world?”
“It’s a lovely and beautiful world,” said the angels, in chorus.
“OK,” she said, “I’ll play your game. Tell me now, who made this varied and sensual world of charm and grace and color? Who gave me intellectual beauty and those rare but beautiful waves of emotions which I have known and enjoyed for their breathtaking meaning and depth?”
“A good and loving spirit,” they said. “That’s our usual answer.”
“And who gave me freedom to love and live and grow, flowering free and fragile, though beautiful, but then withering, faded and forlorn in old age, like some evanescent dream?”
“It was the Creator of all life.”
“And who gave me sadness?”
“HE did,” they answered.
“And who gave the world hunger, pain, misfortune, sickness, death, worry, and unbearable calamity which drags us suffering to the grave?”
“He reigns,” they said.
“Give me his name!” she asked. “Who is he that does not even grant me peace in the grave?—for Hell awaits me there as a further torture, does it not.”
“He rules,” the angels replied.
“His name! I ask but his name—the name of one so cruel! Who is the one that would create man as a precious vessel, though imperfect, and then destroy this lovely creation by sickness and death in rage?”
“He is the One,” they said.
“Name him and let him be known for his vengeful name—for in my own fine dreams of man I allowed no sickness, no pain—all was love and beauty! I gave up all my powers but love. Who is he that is the source of my everlasting pain?”
“HE does not exist,” the angels finally said, “nor does the Devil, nor do we—all simply is as it is and so it ever shall be. It’s the way that the world happens to work. Therefore, all is right with the world. We angels are simply manifestations of your own thoughts. All that is truly real comes from within; nothing comes from without.”
“There is no creative deity?” she asked.
“There is none; there is only an unconscious spirit which is part and parcel with the universe, co-eternal with it and embodied in it as the principle of life in all things. It is the connectedness of all things, and exists far below the level of atoms.”