,
what an ugly picture of Divine incompetence!

Of course there are abundance of facts in the world which look
like anything but love;--the ruthless and merciless punishment of
carelessness and ignorance, the dark laws of heredity, the wastefulness
and cruelty of disease, the dismal acquiescence of stupid, healthy,
virtuous persons, without sympathy or imagination, in the hardships
which they were strong enough to bear unscathed. One of the prime
terrors of religion is the thought of the heavy-handed, unintelligent,
tiresome men who would make it a monopoly if they could, and bear
it triumphantly away from the hands of modest, humble, quiet, and
tender-hearted people, chiding them as nebulous optimists.

Who are the people in this short life of ours whom one remembers with
deep and abiding gratitude? Not those who have rebuked, and punished,
and satirised, and humiliated us, striking down the stricken, and
flattening the prostrate--but the people who have been patient with us,
and kind, who have believed in us, and comforted us, and welcomed us,
and forgiven us everything; who have given us largely of their love, who
have lent without requiring payment, who have given us emotional rather
than prudential reasons, who have cared for us, not as a duty but by
some divine instinct, who have made endless excuses for us, believing
that the true self was there and would emerge, who have pardoned our
misdeeds and forgotten our meannesses.

This is what I would believe of God--that He is not our censorious and
severe critic, but our champion and lover, not loving us in spite of
what we are, but because of what we are; Who in the days of our strength
rejoices in our joy, and does not wish to overshadow it, like the
conscientious human mentor, with considerations that we must yet be
withered like grass; and Who, when the youthful ebullience dies away,
and the spring grows weak, and we wonder why the zest has died out of
simple pleasures, out of agreeable noise and stir, is still with us,
reminding us that the wisdom we are painfully and surely gaining is a
deeper and more lasting quality than even the hot impulses of youth.

Once in my life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had the
skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was attending a
Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was in a pew facing
east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing sideways, there sat a
little old woman, who