"But why don’t they know, dearest? And why does the Bible contradict itself so? And how can God be a ’father’ if he sends pain and sickness and death? Is He any worse than a real father would be? And why does He not answer prayers when He promises to? And when did the healing Jesus taught His disciples disappear? Did He only let them possess the power for a few years? Why are we commanded to be ’perfect’ when God knows we can’t be? And how can you believe in a God who punishes you and sends all manner of evil on you while calling Himself a God of Love?"
"Carolina! Carolina! You make my head swim with your heresies! I don’t know, child! I don’t know the answer to a single one of your questions. Such things do not trouble me. I believe in God, and that satisfies me."
"No, it doesn’t, daddy!" cried the girl, astutely, "but you try to make yourself believe that it does."
"Then try to make yourself believe it, dear. It has done me very well for nearly forty years."
And as usual, such footless discussion ended in nothingness and a burst of human love which effectually put out of mind all gropings after Divine Love!
Then, with no illness to prepare her for so awful a blow, with nothing but a stopping of the heart-beats, Carolina’s father fell into his last, long sleep, and before she could fairly realize her loss, her mother followed him.
Within six weeks, the girl found herself orphaned and mistress of the great Lee fortune, but utterly alone in the world, for her grandfather had died the year previous and Sherman had just married and gone back to America.
That Carolina felt her mother’s loss no one could doubt, but the change in the young girl wrought by her father’s death was something awful to behold. She had not dreamed that he could die. He was so young, so strong, so noble, so upright, such an honour to his country and to his race! Why should perfection cease to exist and the ignorant, wicked, and common live on? Carolina resisted the thought with tigerish fierceness, and openly blasphemed the God who created her.
"God my father?" she stormed at Cousin Lois, who listened with blanched face and trembling fear of further vengeance on the part of outraged Deity. "Why, would my own precious father send me a moment of such suffering as I have passed through ever since they took him away from me? He would have given his life to save me from one heart-pang, and you ask me to believe that God is a father, when He sends such awful anguish into this world?"