“That’s right,” he said. “Did you think I could be what you said I was? Didn’t you know from you own black hearts what mine must be like?”

If evil gave the opportunity for good, it ceased to be evil; if evil set into motion a chain of events that caused an eventual good, larger than the original evil, then it ceased to be evil. He had seen the logic of that at once. And from that logic he had concluded that pain and suffering was God’s greatest gift to man. His mother, of course, had confirmed the reasoning. As she pointed out, without suffering there can be no hope of martyrdom. All of religious fervor should be a seeking of the greatest discomfort, a lusting for the greatest danger to life and limb. Go into strange lands where the people have never heard of you and tell them things they do not want to hear and cannot understand. If you are lucky they will kill you and eat you. Oh! great good fortune to be stripped of flesh, cooked in a pot, and flushed down some pagan’s throat! Lucky man that flops about being hit over the head with clubs, bashed with bricks, and set upon by vicious dogs. That is the way to God, righteousness and the moral life.

“You must know,” he said, “that every man invents the world and justifies everything in it through the miracle of himself, in the same way that every man is convinced that his name appears first on the scroll of Heaven. True, nobody will tell you that, but it doesn’t keep everybody from believing it.”