United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the Greek view, of course God above man, and Fate above God.
It might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream, some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all mingling imperceptibly with one another.
There he was, back in the old hopeless circle. Her touch had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness.
Prohack looked around the noisy restaurant packed with tables, and wondered whether cross-currents were running invisibly over all the tables, and what was the secret force of fashionable fleeting convention which enabled women with brains far inferior to his own to use it effectively for the fighting of sanguinary battles.
And whatever cross-currents there may be, the great line of cleavage is religion. Of course I am aware of the violent efforts that have been made ever since the commencement of the Nationalist agitation to prove that this is not so.
Saulsbury, who walked slowly toward him apparently absorbed in the periodical he had purchased. "It doesn't seem possible we can lose!" he said when they reached their rooms. "There will be cross-currents yet; but a strong tide has set in, bearing us on." He threw the magazine with well-directed aim into a desk in the corner, and meditatively smoothed his hat on his sleeve.
I got into Jake's boat and followed him as quickly as I could, but we were a long way out before I got up with him, swimming strongly, gamely, almost viciously; on, on, heading for the Ghoul Rock and for the cross-currents at the open sea. I reached alongside him, but always he sheered away. I spoke to him kindly and coaxingly, but all I got from him in reply was a whimpering sob, as if to say:
Illumined by the living lamps, and watched by terrified non-combatants, the horrid carnival continued with never-slacking fury and ever-changing background past the mouths of tributary tunnels which increased the volume and velocity of the current and added to the fighting strength, on through widening archways to a repetition of the cross-currents, the thunder, and the sponge-like maze, down past the heaving walls of larger tunnels to branched passages, where, in comparative slack water, the siege of the caves was resumed.
The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the shop into the tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued excitement which grew too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed by the engulfing roar of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do timid battle with their incessant cross-currents of humanity.
Again the flying walls of a tunnel, again a mighty cave, and the cross-currents, and the rhythmical thunder, and now a wild charge down an immense tunnel, the wall of which surged outward and inward, in unison with the roaring of the thunder. The thunder died away in the distance, though the walls still surged even those of a smaller tunnel which divided the current and received them.
Word Of The Day