e people answering to the "hard-hearted," to the "stiff-necked
generation" of the Hebrew prophets. They betray and even confess
to standards that seem hopelessly base to us. They show themselves
incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty or truth or
goodness. They are altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice. To
every test they betray vileness of texture; they are mean, cold, wicked.
There are people who seem to cheat with a private self-approval, who are
ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling
is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and
humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into
persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless
vice. We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is
very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God has
no use for them.

And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the people
with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the few broad
and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we experience, who
lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful conceptions of God,
and are apparently quite incapable of distinguishing between what is
practically and what is spiritually good.

It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way to
God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which we
of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper or the
pickpocket or the "smart" woman or the loan-monger or the village
oaf than he is of the swine in the sty. But are we justified in
thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and intellectual
understandings? Because some people seem to me steadfastly and
consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull and confused, does
it follow that there are not phases, albeit I have never chanced to see
them, of exaltation in the one case and illumination in the other? And
may I not be a little restricting my perception of Good? While I have
been ready enough to pronounce this or that person as being, so far as
I was concerned, thoroughly damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious
reluctance to admit the general proposition which is necessary for
these instances. It is possible that the difference between Arminian and
Calvinist is a difference of essential intellectual temperament rather
than of theoretical conviction. I am temperamentally Arm