If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. Kindness, merely as such, cares ot whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction. I should very much like to live in a universe which was goverened on such lines. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much as a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'A good time was had by all.'. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. The Divine 'goodness' differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored. but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object. It has the master touch- the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face. If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. The claim is so shocking- a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly- that only two views of this man are possible. There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be 'one with', the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. the second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.Īll men stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a unifrom infinity of homogenous matter at a low temperature.
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