“Is simply in the essential goodness of the world. That is what I have been driving at all the time since we began our conversation.”
“But doesn’t Christianity believe in that?”
“No; Christianity believes in the essential badness of the world.”
“Of course!—I forgot. All men are sinners.”
“Yes, that’s it. Christianity believes that the world is bad to the core, and yet it believes that a God Who is all goodness made man right at once and thoroughly bad; left him in this condition for an indefinite time, and then sent His son down to redeem him.
“Now, I have a great reverence for other people’s religious beliefs, but I have a greater reverence for honest thought, and I cannot—though I worship Christ—believe that the world followed that line of development.”
“You worship Christ, yet you deny him!”
“No—I worship Christ because He was entirely lovable. He shines entirely alone in the world of the Western peoples, just as Buddha shines in the world of the Eastern. He was goodness itself made visible and audible. I worship all I can understand of Him. I cannot worship Him as a mystical figure sent suddenly to earth to be put to a cruel death in order that I might be saved, simply because my brain cannot understand that process and proceeding, and I cannot worship what I cannot understand. It is my defect, perhaps, but that defect is shared by numerous people.
“And I speak for those people when I say that faith with us is impossible unless based on a sure foundation of reason; that we must understand before we can worship, that we do not deny God, but that we do not see Him, and that if He, the maker of the world, does exist as an individual entity, we have implicit faith that He is the fountain and origin of all goodness, and that goodness is His robe; that we worship goodness and humbly believe that if He does exist beyond the ken of our purblind eyes, He takes our worship of His robe as homage to Himself far more profound than homage exacted by fear or by superstition, and equal to the homage which great and saintly souls lay at His feet by virtue, perhaps, of their truer sight of Him.
“But we deny, utterly, the essential badness of man, and our denial is based on the sure fact that as man grows in stature, so, pari passu, he grows in goodness. We believe that man, unaided by miracles, can increase in goodness just by the virtue of the goodness that is in life, a seed in the cave man, a flower in the civilised; we believe that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have produced better ethical result than all the teaching of the Apostles, simply because those great fibres of communication have enabled men to develop by mutual touch and the good in each individual man to rush upward and find a vast field of new growth in the field of universal good, a field that shines now, like a star galaxy above the hell of darkness of a hundred years ago.