“I should need to know something of his history, rightly to understand that. Why should he be able to think anything too good to be true? Why should a thing not be true because it is good? It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something beneath the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it. But if the man really thought as you suggest, I would say to him, ‘You cannot know such a being does not exist. Is it possible you should be content that such a being should not exist? If such a being did exist, would you be content never to find him, but to go on for ever and ever saying, He can’t be! He can’t be! He’s so good he can’t be! Supposing you find one day that there he is, will your defence before him be satisfactory? Will you say, “There he is after all, but he was too good to believe in, therefore I did not try to find him”? Will you say to him—If you had not been so good, if you had been a little less good, a little worse, just a trifle bad, I could and would have believed in you?’”

“But if the man could not believe there was any such being, how could he have heart to look for him?”

“If he believed the idea of him so good, yet did not desire such a being enough to wish that he might be, enough to feel it worth his while to cry out, in some fashion or other, after him, then I could not help suspecting something wrong in his will, or his moral nature. Perhaps the words he spoke were but words, and that he did not really and truly feel that the idea of such a God was too good to be true. In any such case, his maker would not have cause to be satisfied with him. And if his maker was not satisfied with what he had made, do you think the man made would have cause to be satisfied with himself?”

“But if he was made so?”

“Then no good being, not to say a faithful creator, would blame him for what he could not help. If the God had made his creature incapable of knowing him, then of course the creature would not feel that he needed to know him. He would be where we generally imagine the lower animals—unable, therefore not caring to know who made him.”

“But is not that just the point? A man may say truly, ‘I don’t feel I want to know anything about God. I do not believe I am made to understand him. I take no interest in the thought of a God’!”