self divine or
sacramental or anything of the sort. Being in love is a condition that
may have its moments of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part
an experience far down the scale below divine experience; it is often
love only in so far as it shares the name with better things; it is
greed, it is admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement,
it is the instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is
adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate. On a hundred scores 'lovers'
meet and part. Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of God in
themselves or others.

Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it. That is no reason
why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness should be
made an obligation upon all men and women who are attracted by one
another, nor why it should be woven into the essentials of religion.
For women much more than for men is this confusion dangerous, lest a
personal love should shape and dominate their lives instead of God. "He
for God only; she for God in him," phrases the idea of Milton and of
ancient Islam; it is the formula of sexual infatuation, a formula quite
easily inverted, as the end of Goethe's Faust ("The woman soul leadeth
us upward and on") may witness. The whole drift of modern religious
feeling is against this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of
sexual slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the healthy love
of ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is
an essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference,
exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the former
and are absolutely incompatible with the latter. The former is the
intensest realisation of which our individualities are capable; the
latter is the way of escape from the limitations of individuality. It
may be true that a few men and more women do achieve the completest
unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly love. So the poets and
romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an imaginative perversion they
have given to some attractive person a worship that should be reserved
for God and a devotion that is normally evoked only by little children
in their mother's heart. It is not the way between most of the men and
women one meets in this world.

But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is nothing
else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MODERN IDEAS OF SIN