and all our woe."

But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but our
future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure of
a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his
strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time, eager
to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that was
still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean, discriminating
weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his lips should fall
apart with eagerness for the great adventure before him, and he should
be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting the rising sun. Death
should still hang like mists and cloud banks and shadows in the valleys
of the wide landscape about him. There should be dew upon the threads of
gossamer and little leaves and blades of the turf at his feet. . . .

4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE

One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most trite
and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that deserves
careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used; there are people
who will say they love new potatoes; there are a multitude of loves
of different colours and values. There is the love of a mother for her
child, there is the love of brothers, there is the love of youth and
maiden, and the love of husband and wife, there is illicit love and the
love one bears one's home or one's country, there are dog-lovers and the
loves of the Olympians, and love which is a passion of jealousy. Love
is frequently a mere blend of appetite and preference; it may be
almost pure greed; it may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit
self-forgetful nor generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the
furtive craving of a man for another man's wife may be made out to be
a light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts of
love that people will call "true love," there is something of that same
exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential quality of the
knowledge of God.

Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the windows
by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is the open door
by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor disappoints, nor betrays.

The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
pos