2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of God lies next through the conscience. What is it, this indistinct knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate self-interest?
Why must the boy leave his brilliant prospects and put himself under the bullets and shells in the trenches? Why must the mother let him go? It is only a shallow thinker, I believe, who can remain long under the impression that the "categorical imperative," as Kant called it, or, as we might say, this insistent, imperious voice, can be produced by any process of evolution at all. It speaks like the voice of a person; it argues like a person; it refuses to be silenced like a person. And the argument is more than justified that, if there is a Person who made the world and still carries it on, it is more than probably the same Person who is speaking to us in conscience. The fact that by His warnings and encouragements He clearly cares so much for righteousness is a standing witness that the Person who swings the stars is more than a strong and clever devil, which the author of the material universe alone might conceivably be, but a Person with a passion for goodness. Otherwise, as Dr. Chalmers said, He would not have placed in the breast of every one of His children, of every one of His created beings, a reclaiming witness against Himself.
We have come, then, a good way out of sceptical vagueness when we have arrived at a Person of appalling power, and yet of equally appalling righteousness, who is thundering His will through every conscience in the world, as though standing in the midst of the universe and striking at the same time four hundred million gongs; not leaving it for someone else to do, but doing it Himself.
But, alas! we are still far from loving Him, for indeed He is still far from being lovable. Love is the only thing which we cannot command at will and which we cannot give at will; and the world would be in a sorry plight so far as loving God is concerned, if nothing more had been done by God than this.
3. After all, there are many things which might make us inclined to hate this immensely strong and righteous Person. With all His strength and with all His righteousness, there is a terrible amount of suffering in the world. The old question that some of your children may have asked you who are mothers has far more in it than appears upon the surface: "Oh, mother, why does not God kill the devil?" The world is filled with injustice and cruelty, and especially so to-day. Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, as I have seen with my own eyes, are in ruins. So are thousands of homes in Belgium, France, and Poland, and yet not one single thing was done by the innocent inhabitants to deserve this fate. Who is going to give life again to the hundreds shot in cold blood in Louvain and Aerschott and elsewhere, and seen shot by one of the clergy of the diocese of London; or honour again to the outraged women and girls; or restore the dead children—born and unborn—to the mothers who lost their children in the last Zeppelin raid? Where is the God of the fatherless and of the widow? It is all very well to say, "It is God in His holy habitation." But why does He sit up there in His holy habitation while such things are being done upon earth? Is He reclining, as Tennyson pictured the ancient gods,
"On the hills, like gods together,
Careless of mankind"?
He may stay there; but if He does, who is going to love Him? Whom do we love in England to-day? Is our popular hero the man who, while he remains safe in the shelter of his home, suggests that someone else should go and do something to save the country? For myself, if I thought God was like that, I should not love Him. Browning, with that piercing insight which has helped so many, puts the matter in a sentence. Is it possible, he asks in that great argument contained in the poem "Saul,"
"Here the parts shift,
Here the creature surpasses the Creator?"
"Would I suffer for him that I love?" cries David, as he looks with love and pity on stricken Saul. "Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldest Thou, so wilt Thou." And it is an argument that no petty quibbles can affect. For instance, if the boys in the trenches every day and every night so give their lives for their friends; if the mother every day so loves the world that she gives her only begotten son, and God either cannot or will not, then man is greater than God; then the creature surpasses the Creator; the parts in the great drama have changed indeed.