“Oh, no,” she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair. “We do things from our mothers—not for them. We don’t have to do things for them—they don’t need it, you know. But we have to live on—splendidly—because of them; and that’s the way we feel about God.”
I meditated again. I thought of that God of Battles of ours, that Jealous God, that Vengeance-is-mine God. I thought of our world-nightmare—Hell.
“You have no theory of eternal punishment then, I take it?”
Ellador laughed. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and there were tears in them, too. She was so sorry for me.
“How could we?” she asked, fairly enough. “We have no punishments in life, you see, so we don’t imagine them after death.”
“Have you no punishments? Neither for children nor criminals—such mild criminals as you have?” I urged.
“Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have preventive measures, and cures; sometimes we have to ‘send the patient to bed,’ as it were; but that’s not a punishment—it’s only part of the treatment,” she explained.
Then studying my point of view more closely, she added: “You see, we recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting force—patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method. We credit God—our idea of God—with all that and more. Our mothers are not angry with us—why should God be?”
“Does God mean a person to you?”
This she thought over a little. “Why—in trying to get close to it in our minds we personify the idea, naturally; but we certainly do not assume a Big Woman somewhere, who is God. What we call God is a Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling Spirit, something inside of us that we want more of. Is your God a Big Man?” she asked innocently.