It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage… - Clifford D. Simak

Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well?

She always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.

She looked quickly up. And then her eyes once more went back to the flashing thing she was holding in her hands. He saw that it was the pyramid of spheres and now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions, and that as they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light.
Enoch caught his breath at the beauty and the wonder of it — the old, hard wonder of what this thing might be and what it might be meant to do. He had examined it a hundred times or more and had puzzled at it and there had been nothing he could find that was of significance. So far as he could see, it was only something that was meant to be looked at, although there had been that persistent feeling that it had a purpose and that, perhaps, somehow, it was meant to operate.
And now it was in operation. He had tried a hundred times to get it figured out and Lucy had picked it up just once and had got it figured out. He noticed the rapture with which she was regarding it. Was it possible, he wondered, that she knew its purpose?