John: You would be honest with God! Tut, tut!—a pretty state of things! A theory like that could upset the world.
Elinor: Tant pis!—I am not talking of expediency. I am stating my beliefs.
John: Go ahead.
Elinor: I felt that because we had received this divine triple loan from God of understanding, apprehension, and emotion, with its branches of deduction, critical faculty, and appreciation—all things beyond the material—we at least owed Him something in return. You will admit, I suppose, that decent people do not accept the loan of a friend’s house and then utterly neglect and defile it?
John: It would be in shocking taste.
Elinor: Then doing the thousand-and-one actions which defile the soul are in shocking taste also. Don Quixote was infinitely nearer a true knowledge of the obligation entailed by the possession of this loan than any of us modern people!
John: Oh, heavens! are you going to drag in fictional characters to illustrate your tirade? I feel the yawn coming.
Elinor: Then I will state what to me are the facts of religion. I believe that I personally, and each one of us, have received from God, for the term of our sojourn on earth, a spark of Himself, and, since He has had the intelligence to construct this planet and a number of others, He cannot be so wholly wanting in logic as deliberately to throw this spark of Himself into temptation, and then deliberately to punish it for falling. If I believed God capable of that I should utterly despise Him.
John: It sounds mean.
Elinor: Of course. Now think a moment. Each unit being a part of the eternal scheme, the soul of each unit being a spark of the Divine Consciousness, it follows surely that the basis of all religion is that we must not soil our souls—not from the fear of hell or hope of heaven, but because they, being lent by God, must return to Him untarnished. The law of cause and effect takes care of the punishments or rewards. We bring each upon ourselves by our own actions; setting in motion an inevitable machinery producing consequence, as surely as when we thrust our hand into the fire it is burnt.