h his
world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of
vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but
indifference to God's facts and to God's nature? If religion is
union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the
mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is
not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different
altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament.
prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is
our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but
something else--a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some
trifling martinet who can be humbugged--or, to come to ourselves, a
majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality?
For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to God's facts leads
to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold
Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else
could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to
germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction "in pari
materia"; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This serves in
some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant
sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise. Surely it is
because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left
little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God. What
Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already,
but heedless as they were of God's requirements of them, they were
not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees. Further,
whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly
gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of
God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.

The fourth group are those who cannot make up their minds. "No man,
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the
Kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). The word is an interesting one
("euthetos"), it means "handy" or "easy to place." (The word is used
of the salt not "fit" for land or dunghill (Luke 14:35), and the
negative of the inconvenient harbour (Acts 27:12).) This man is not
adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place there. Like
the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is
not exactly bad; but he is "no good," as we say. Jesus conceives of
the Kingdom