‘Or fancy you do,’ I assented, ‘that you love him—not merely because you are told he is good. The Fejee islander might assert his God to be good, but would that make you love him? If you heard that a great power, away somewhere, who had nothing to do with you at all, was very good, would that make you able to love him?’
‘Yes, it would,’ said Mary, decidedly. ‘It is only a good man who would see that God was good.’
‘There you argue entirely on my side. It must be because you supposed his goodness what you call goodness—not something else—that you could love him on testimony. But even then your love could not be of that mighty absorbing kind which alone you would think fit between you and your God. It would not be loving him with all your heart and soul and strength and mind—would it? It would be loving him second-hand—not because of himself, seen and known by yourself.’
‘But Charley does not even love God second-hand,’ she said, with a despairing mournfulness.
‘Perhaps because he is very anxious to love him first-hand, and what you tell him about God does not seem to him to be good. Surely neither man nor woman can love because of what seems not good! I confess one may love in spite of what is bad, but it must be because of other things that are good.’
She was silent.
‘However goodness may change its forms,’ I went on, ‘it must still be goodness; only if we are to adore it, we must see something of what it is—of itself. And the goodness we cannot see, the eternal goodness, high above us as the heavens are above the earth, must still be a goodness that includes, absorbs, elevates, purifies all our goodness, not tramples upon it and calls it wickedness. For if not such, then we have nothing in common with God, and what we call goodness is not of God. He has not even ordered it; or, if he has, he has ordered it only to order the contrary afterwards; and there is, in reality, no real goodness—at least in him; and, if not in him, of whom we spring—where then?—and what becomes of ours, poor as it is?’
My reader will see that I had already thought much about these things; although, I suspect, I have now not only expressed them far better than I could have expressed them in conversation, but with a degree of clearness which must be owing to the further continuance of the habit of reflecting on these and cognate subjects. Deep in my mind, however, something like this lay; and in some manner like this I tried to express it.
Finding that she continued silent, and that Charley did not appear inclined to renew the contest, anxious also to leave no embarrassing silence to choke the channel now open between us—I mean Mary and myself—I returned to the original question.
‘It seems to me, Charley—and it follows from all we have been saying—that the sin of suicide lies just in this, that it is an utter want of faith in God. I confess I do not see any Other ground on which to condemn it—provided, always, that the man has no other dependent upon him, none for whom he ought to live and work.’