“Impersonal, I grant you, and therefore more logical, even according to human reason, than the huge, passionate anthropomorphism of Jew and Christian. Consciousness and personality imply the notion of limits and conditions; and which is the grander idea—a limited, conditioned Power, however great, or, an absolute transcendent Godhead, free from all the limits which govern our finite being? God cannot be conscious as we understand consciousness, nor personal as we understand personality-If He were, then indeed we might well believe that we were made after His image and likeness.”
“And can you find comfort in such a creed? Can you turn for strength, or grace, or consolation to such a power as you describe?”
“Why should I?” asked Mr. Haldane, smiling. “If I need any of these things, my need is the result of some law violated or unobserved. The world is ruled by law, and every breach of law entails an inescapable penalty. If I suffer I must endure.”
“That is cold comfort for all the sum of misery in the world.”
“It is the only true comfort. The rest is delusion. Preach that every violated law avenges itself, not in some half mythical hell at the close of a life that seems illimitable—for men never do realize that they will one day die—but avenges itself here and now; preach that no crucified Redeemer can interfere between the violator of the law and its penalty; preach that if men sin they will infallibly suffer, and you will really do something to regenerate mankind. Christianity, with its doctrines of atonement and vicarious suffering and redemption, has done as much to fill the world with vice, crime, and disease as the most degraded, creed of pagan or savage. The groaning and travail of creation are clamant proofs that vicarious suffering and redemption are the veriest dreams.”
“Either purposely or inadvertently you mix up the physical and the moral law,” interposed the vicar.
“The physical and the moral are but one law, articles of the one universal code of nature.”
“True,” said the vicar. “I forgot that you denied man his immortal soul, as you deny him his divine sonship. And so you are content to believe that man is born to live, labour, suffer, and perish.”
“Concede that God is content that such should be man’s destiny,” replied Mr. Haldane, “what then?”
“What then?” echoed the vicar, rising from his chair with flashing eyes and agitated face; “why, then life is a fiendish mockery!”