or faith, Than churchmen. He's a prohibitionist, The poor's protagonist, the knight at arms Of fallen women, yelling at the rich Whose wicked greed makes all the prostitutes—      No prostitutes without the wicked rich! But as he ages, as the bitter days Approach with perorations: O ye vipers, The engine in him changes all the world, Reverses all the wheels of thought behind. For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman. He dumps the truth of Jesus over—there It lies with his youth's textual skepticism, And laughter at the supernatural. Now what's the motivating principle Of such a mind? In youth he sought for rules      Wherewith to trail and capture truths. He found it In James McCosh's Logic, it was this:      Lex Exclusi Tertii aut Medii, Law of Excluded Middle speaking plain:      A thing is true, or not true, never a third Hypothesis, so God is or is not. That's very good to start with, how to end And how to know which of the two is false—      He hunted out the false, as mother did—      Requires a tool. He found it in this book, Reductio ad absurdum; let us see Excluded middle use reductio. God is or God is not, but then what God? Excluded Middle never sought a God To suffer demolition at his hands Except the God of Illinois, the God Grown but a little with his followers Since Moses lived and Peter fished. So now God is or God is not. Let us assume God is and use reductio ad absurdum, Taking away the rotten props, the posts That do not fit or hold, and let Him fall. For if he falls, the other postulate That God is not is demonstrated. See A universe of truth pass on the way Cleared by Excluded Middle through the stuff Of thought and visible things, a way that lets A greater God escape, uncaught by all The nippers of reductio ad absurdum. But to resume his argument was this:      God is or God is not, but if God is Why pestilence and war, earthquake and famine? He either wills them, or cannot prevent them, But if he wills them God is evil, if He can't prevent them, he is limited. But God, you say, is good, omnipotent, And here I prove Him evil, or too weak To stay the evil. Having shown your God Lacking in what makes God, the proposition Which I oppose to this, that God is not Stands proven. For as evil is most clear In sickness, pain and death, it cannot be There is a Power with strength to overcome them, Yet suffers them to be. And so this man Went through the years of life, and stripped the fields Of beauty and of thought with mandibles     

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