It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.

Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our experience.  They are people answering to the “hard-hearted,” to the “stiff-necked generation” of the Hebrew prophets.  They betray and even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us.  They show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty or truth or goodness.  They are altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice.  To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are mean, cold, wicked.  There are people who seem to cheat with a private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless vice.  We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use for them.

And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the people with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the few broad and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we experience, who lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful conceptions of God, and are apparently quite incapable of distinguishing between what is practically and what is spiritually good.

It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way to God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which we of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper or the pickpocket or the “smart” woman or the loan-monger or the village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty.  But are we justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and intellectual understandings?  Because some people seem to me steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and illumination in the other?  And may I not be a little restricting my perception of Good?  While I have been ready enough to pronounce this or that person as being, so far as I was concerned, thoroughly damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious reluctance to admit the general proposition which is necessary for these instances.  It is possible that the difference between Arminian and Calvinist is a difference of essential intellectual temperament rather than of theoretical conviction.  I am temperamentally Arminian as I am temperamentally Nominalist.  I feel that it must be in the nature of God to attempt all souls.  There must be accessibilities I can only suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.