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The reality of such vast amounts of suffering provides atheists with their most powerful argument. Earthquakes, made inevitable by stresses in strata below the earth's surface, can snuff out the lives of thousands. Little children die of cancer. Millions can be killed by epidemics such as the Black Death of the fourteenth century.
The only possible way a theist can escape from the atheist's charge—either God is malevolent or there is no God—is to view Nature as the back of reality. Beyond what Lord Dunsany liked to call "the fields we know" there is a larger, wholly other unseen realm. Logic cannot prove its existence, and science is helpless in efforts to penetrate it, but by a leap of faith we can escape despair by looking forward to a life beyond the grave where God will in some manner, utterly beyond our understanding, rectify the mad injustices of the fields we know. This is the great hope that glows at the heart of theism and at the core of Chesterton's melodrama.
Many readers over the decades have found it difficult to understand who Sunday is. In the first chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, the protagonist is said to have liked The Man Who Was Thursday but without understanding it. An unsigned reviewer in the Aberdeen Free Press (March 12, 1908) ended his review by saying he was entertained by G. K.'s "brilliant prose" but put the book down "with no earthly idea" of what it was all about.
Who, then, is Sunday? Chesterton himself made it plain enough, not only in his novel but also in scattered comments about the novel. Sunday is simply Nature, or the Universe when seen as distinct from the Creator. The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has two aspects that theologians like to call transcendence and immanence. God is totally beyond the universe and our comprehension yet at the same time closer to us than breathing, as the Bible says, or, in the Koran's words, closer than the main artery in our neck. Sunday is God's immanence. He is Nature, the Universe, with its unalterable God-given, God-upheld laws that seem so obviously indifferent about our welfare.
Sunday, like Nature, has a front and back side. From the back he resembles what Chesterton calls in The Uses of Diversity (chap. 9) a "semi-supernatural monster." From the front he looks like an angel. Nature lavishes on us a thousand gifts that make us happy and grateful to be alive, yet the same Nature can destroy entire cities with seemingly random earthquakes. It can drown us with floods, kill us with tornadoes and diseases. Ultimately it will execute us.
Atheists and theists alike must face the fact that Nature cares not a rap whether you or I live or die, or even whether the human race will survive. There is no guarantee that some day a giant comet or asteroid will not strike the earth and obliterate all life. We may destroy ourselves with nuclear war. There is no assurance that man will not ultimately vanish like the dinosaurs.
Throughout Chesterton's nightmare are numerous hints that Sunday is pagan Nature. He is monstrously huge and shapeless. When he stands he seems to fill the sky. His room and clothes are neat, but he is absent-minded and at times his great eyes suddenly go blind. Did G. K. make his eyes blue because that is the color of the sky? Sunday's white hair suggests his great age. We are told he never sleeps. Like God's omnipresence, he can be in six places at once. He is capable of smashing a person "like a fly." He resembles a human but actually "is not a man." Like Pan he is half human, half animal.
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