Chapter 22

Fix in your minds--or rather, ask God to fix in your minds--this one idea of an absolutely good God; good with all forms of goodness which you respect and love in man; good as you, and I, and every honest man, understand the plain word good. Slowly you will acquire that grand and all-illuminating idea; slowly, and most imperfectly at best: for who is mortal man that he should conceive and comprehend the goodness of the infinitely good God? But see then whether, in the light of that one idea, all the old-fashioned Christian ideas about the relations of God to man; whether a Providence, Prayer, Inspiration, Revelation; the Incarnation, the Passion, and the final triumph, of the Son of God--whether all these, I say, do not begin to seem to you, not merely beautiful, not merely probable; but rational, and logical, and necessary, moral consequences from the one idea of An Absolute and Eternal Goodness, the Living Parent of the Universe.

And so I leave you to the Grace of God.

Footnotes:

{0a} Second edition, pp. 78, 79.

{39} J. P. Richter.

CAMBRIDGE. PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.