sessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced trust,
and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love of God.
The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a climax, and then
again seeks presently a climax, and that may be satiated or fatigued.
But the latter is far more like the love of comrades, or like the
love of a man and a woman who have loved and been through much trouble
together, who have hurt one another and forgiven, and come to a complete
and generous fellowship. There is a strange and beautiful love that men
tell of that will spring up on battlefields between sorely wounded men,
and often they are men who have fought together, so that they will do
almost incredibly brave and tender things for one another, though but
recently they have been trying to kill each other. There is often a pure
exaltation of feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in
any great stress. These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest
to what we mean when we speak of the love of God.

That is man's love of God, but there is also something else; there is
the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this is not
an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love of a woman
for her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men; God must love
his followers as a great captain loves his men, who are so foolish, so
helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet whose faith alone makes
him possible. It is an austere love. The spirit of God will not hesitate
to send us to torment and bodily death. . . .

And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach
him. He has need of us as we of him. He desires us and desires to make
himself known to us. When at last the individual breaks through the
limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that moment, the smile
and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man. He has won us from his
enemy. We come staggering through into the golden light of his kingdom,
to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until at last we are altogether
taken up into his being.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST

It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to drape
about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God, the
honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is
constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness. It wil