ter all, sin must have
been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and
all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose
what was not there already in the Mind of God.

And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling
upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus
if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he
is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad
impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to
bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.

And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant
change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark
profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change
in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come
himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the
human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a
helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God,
there is nothing that I could not believe of him.

And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy
and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth
than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the
stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and
preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of
the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of
the system which made such tranquil lives possible.

Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when
the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul
seemed shut out from God--"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones,
"that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it
seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this
courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of
the sorrowful fellowship.

One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible
horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the
cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all
hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and
bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an
undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement,
but a