Explore "God and the Man" by Robert W. Buchanan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
So Christian fell at once into that great blackness where the atheist lies, with eyes averted from heaven and his forehead pressed into the hard earth. By no intellectual process, by no succession of bitter doubts and ruthless syllogism, but simply through the utterness of moral despair, there was forced upon his soul the consciousness that the world is without God, and that those who doubted God's very existence were in the right. If there were a God indeed, if the gentle Providence of the preacher were a fact or a possibility, such things could never have been; that at least seemed clear. Or if God existed, he must be on the side of evil; cruel, pitiless, incomprehensible, unblessing and unblest. All was blind fate; anarchy subsisting in the very shadow of death.
Feeling this, in all the tumult of his wild grief, he sat and looked in the eyes of the dead woman, not yet closed reverently, but fixed in horrible contemplation of some sight of terror which only dead eyes see; sat and gazed into her eyes and held her clay cold hand till his own fingers felt like ice, and the chill of the grave was in his heart. Hours passed thus. Night and death were in the house, with no sound, no stir.