Graham Greene: Heart

‘What is terrible?’ ‘A child like that.’ ‘Yes. Both parents were lost. But it is all right. She will die.’ Scobie watched the bearers go slowly up the hill, their bare feet very gently flapping the ground. He thought: It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that. Not that the child would die—that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different, but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat—that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.

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