ordained priest and minister as his first act of faith. Once that

he has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for him ever to
repeat his creed again. His course seems plain and clear. It

becomes him to stand up before the flock he has led in error, and to
proclaim the being and nature of the one true God. He must be

explicit to the utmost of his powers. Then he may await his
expulsion. It may be doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go

away silently, making false excuses or none at all for his retreat.
He has to atone for the implicit acquiescences of his conforming

years.
10. THE UNIVERSALISM OF GOD

Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from
God?

This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it
reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious

interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and
the Calvinist. From its very openingproposition modern religion

sweeps past and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans
and Methodists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of

God. Arminians seem merely to have insisted that God has
conditioned himself, and by his own free act left men free to accept

or rejectsalvation. To the realist type of mind--here as always I
use "realist" in its proper sense as the opposite of nominalist--to

the old-fashioned, over-exact and over-accentuating type of mind,
such ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying. Just as it

distresses the more downright kind of intelligence with a feeling of
disloyalty to admit that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the

same sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear line to be
drawn between the saved and the lost. Realists like an exclusive

flavour in their faith. Moreover, it is a natural weakness of
humanity to be forced into extreme positions by argument. It is

probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute attributes
of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses of

propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human
obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to

theological debate. It is but a step from the realisation that
there are people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see

God as we see him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut
off from God by an invincible soul blindness.

It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially" target="_blank" title="ad.本质上，基本上">essentiallydamned.
Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there

are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our
experience. They are 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" target="_blank" title="ad.无希望地，绝望地">hopelessly base to us. They

show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty
or truth or goodness. They are altogetherremote 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" target="_blank" title="ad.无希望地，绝望地">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 essentialintellectualtemperament rather than of

theoretical conviction. I am temperamentally Arminian as I am
temperamentally Nominalist. I feel that it must be in the nature of

God to attempt all souls. There must be accessibilities I can only
suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.

Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way. If you
think, as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and

damned, then I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other
people can be damned. But that is not to believe that there are

people damned at the outset by their moral and intellectual
insufficiency; that is not to make out that there is a class of

essential and incurablespiritual defectives. The religious life
preceded clear religious understanding and extends far beyond its

range.
In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to

true belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing.
The essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere.

I am passionatelyanxious to have the idea of God clear in my own
mind, and to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and

particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I
do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on

confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer
irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas.

I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured
by the definite knowledge of the true God. Yet I have also to admit

that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled by
people with whom I have no intellectualsympathy and no agreement in

phrase or formula at all.
There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling

and this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as
myself and a convert of the Salvation Army. Here, clothing itself

in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs
and fountains of precious blood, a most repulsive and

incomprehensible idiom to me, and expressing itself by shouts,
clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings that stun

and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object sought, release from
self, and the same end, the end of identification with the immortal,

successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved. I see God
indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I

could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual
understandings, lit by the manifestreflection of divinity. One may

be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities
if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday

life. There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing

human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its
tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it,

as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its
inner point in the directest contact with God. Religion may suffer

from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or
nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth. The methods

of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may
long survive it. Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and

cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern
revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull

nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call beyond the
immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of

Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.
The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies

may be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release
among types and strata that by the standards of a trained and

explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless. It is not
necessary to imagine the whole world critical and lucid in order to

imagine the whole world unified in religious sentiment,
comprehending the same phrases and coming together regardless of

class and race and quality, in the worship and service of the true
God. The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than hieratic

tyranny must have this universality of appeal. As the head grows
clear the body will turn in the right direction. To the mass of men