In August, 1872 Mr. D——­ tried to meet this difficulty.  He wrote: 

“With regard to the impassibility of God, I think there is a stone wrong among your foundations which causes your difficulty.  Another wrong stone is, I think, your view of the nature of the sin and error which is supposed to grieve God.  I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the production of the perfect man.  It was foreseen and allowed as a means to an end—­as in fact an education.

“The view of all the sin and misery in the world cannot grieve God, any more than it can grieve you to see Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a rabbit-hutch.  All is part of the training.  God looks at the ideal man to which all tends.  The popular idea of the fall is to me a very absurd one.  There was never an ideal state in the past, but there will be in the future.  The Genesis allegory simply typifies the first awakening of consciousness of good and evil—­of two wills in a mind hitherto only animal-psychic.

“Well then—­there being no occasion for grief in watching the progress of his own perfect and unfailing plans—­your difficulty in God’s impassibility vanishes.  Christ, qua God, was, of course, impassible too.  It seems to me that your position implies that God’s ‘designs’ have partially (at least) failed, and hence the grief of perfect benevolence.  Now I stoutly deny that any jot or tittle of God’s plans can fail.  I believe in the ordering of all for the best.  I think that the pain consequent on broken law is only an inevitable necessity, over which we shall some day rejoice.

“The indifference shown to God’s love cannot pain Him.  Why? because it is simply a sign of defectiveness in the creature which the ages will rectify.  The being who is indifferent is not yet educated up to the point of love.  But he will be.  The pure and holy suffering of Christ was (pardon me) wholly the consequence of his human nature.  True it was because of the perfection of his humanity.  But his Divinity had nothing to do with it.  It was his human heart that broke.  It was because he entered a world of broken laws and of incomplete education that he became involved in suffering with the rest of his race.....

“No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.  I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the morality of God and the moral order of the world.  I have no more doubt about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid dream.  I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little bit of truth it has been given me to see.  I am told that ‘Present-day Papers’, by Bishop Ewing (edited) are a wonderful help, many of them, to puzzled people:  I mean to get them.  But I am sure you will find that the truth will (even