come to limit God--to say,
here the responsibility of the faithful God stops, here man's
self-destruction begins--I can't believe that. He must be responsible,
not only for starting us with freedom, but responsible for the use we
make of it and for all the consequence. When you say of the infinite God
that hell and the devils are something outside of Him--I can't think
that. The devils must live and move and have their being in Him. When
you say the holy God ever said to spirit He had created, 'Depart from
Me' (except in a parable meaning that as long as a spirit chose evil it
would not be conscious of God's nearness), I tell you, sir, by all He
has taught me out of the Bible you gave me, I don't believe it. We've
studied the Bible so much now that we know that holiness is just
love--the sort of love that holds holy hatred and every other good
feeling within itself. We know that love can't fail and cast out the
thing it loves. When we know a law, we know the way it must work. If the
Bible seems to say the big law it teaches doesn't work out true, it must
be like what is said of the six days of creation, something that came as
near as it could to what people would understand, but that needs a new
explanation."

The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm. He sat looking very
stern and sad.

"When you begin to doubt God's word, you will soon doubt that He is, and
that He is the rewarder of them that seek Him."

"Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believe
what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is
contradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because they
thought them. But it's not that I would set myself up to know about
doctrines, if it wasn't that this doctrine had driven me to stop
believing and stop caring to do right. I can't just explain it clearly,
but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you told
me, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love of
God as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was a
something--I didn't know exactly what--that I couldn't bring my mind to;
so I just left it. But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, then
it came on me all of a sudden that I didn't want a God who had to do
with such a little part of life as that. You see it had been simmering
in my mind all the days that I stopped doing the things you told me were
wrong and yet went on keeping among the