5.  The heresy of quietism

God comes to us within and takes us for his own.  He releases us from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience and adventure; he receives us and gives himself.  He is a stimulant; he makes us live immortally and more abundantly.  I have compared him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.

The finding of God is the beginning of service.  It is not an escape from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the prison of the mortal self.  Not to realise that, is the heresy of Quietism, of many mystics.  Commonly such people are people of some wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs.  They make religion a method of indolence.  They turn their backs on the toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious reverie in which they flirt with the divinity.  They will recount their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully God has tried and proved them.  But indeed the true God was not the lover of Madame Guyon.  The true God is not a spiritual troubadour wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose.  The true God goes through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits along the street.  We must go out to him.  We must accept his discipline and fight his battle.  The peace of God comes not by thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.

6.  God does not punish

Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for moral indignation.  Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.  They were more often “wrath” than not.  Such was the temperament of the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves, against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually “upset” by the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.  Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms.  This divine “frightfulness” is of course the natural human dislike and distrust for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its secular arm. . . .