Then what is He to do? What can He do, ma’am?” repeated Molly.
“Yes, that’s true! The old story. … Voltaire already said it. … We all know it, and all say it; but my case is different. … Why can’t He grant my prayer when I do not ask anything bad, but only that He should not kill my darling boy, without whom I cannot live?”
So said the mother, and she felt his plump little arms round her neck, and his warm little body nestling against hers.
“How good that it did not really happen! …” thought she.
“But that is not all, ma’am …” Molly insisted, in her usual blundering way. “That is not all. Sometimes only one person asks, and yet He can’t possibly do it. … We know that, quite well! … I know it, you see, because I take His messages,” said Molly, the angel, in just the same voice in which yesterday, after taking a message from her mistress to her master, she told the nurse: “I know master is at home, for I have taken him a message.”
“How often have I had to report to Him,” said Molly, “that someone—a young one generally—asks to be helped not to do bad deeds, not get drunk or live loosely—asks, in fact, that vice should be extracted from him as if it were a splinter!”
“How well Molly speaks!” thought her mistress.
“… But He cannot possibly do it, for each one must try for himself. … Only by trying does one get better. You yourself, ma’am, gave me a fairytale to read about a black hen which gave a magic hemp-seed to a boy who saved her life. As long as the seed was in his trouser-pocket, he knew all his lessons without learning them, and so this seed made him stop learning and quite lose his memory. … He, our Father, cannot take evil out of people; and they should not ask Him to do it, but they should pull it out—wash it out—tear it out of themselves!”
“Where has she got all this from?” thought her mistress, and said: