“Really, most refreshing,” chortled Father Riley.  “More, more!” and he rapped for silence.

“The man of to-day must have a God who never fails.  Disguise it as you will, your Christian God was never loved.  No God can be loved who threatens destruction for not loving him.  We cannot love one whom we are not free not to love.”

“Where shall we find this God—­outside of Holy Writ,” demanded Floud, who had once or twice restrained himself with difficulty, in spite of his amusement.

“The true God comes to life in your own consciousness, if you will clear it of the blasphemous preconceptions imposed by Christianity,” answered Bernal so seriously that no one had the heart to interrupt him.  “Of course we can never personify God save as a higher power of self.  Moses did no more; Jesus did no more.  And if we could stop with this—­be content with saying ’God is better than the best man’—­we should have a formula permitting endless growth, even as He permits it to us.  God has been more generous to us than the Church has been to Him.  While it has limited Him to that god of bloody sacrifice conceived by a barbaric Jew, He has permitted us to grow so that now any man who did not surpass him morally, as the scriptures portray him, would be a man of inconceivable malignity.

“You see the world has demonstrated facts that disprove the Godship of your God and your Saviour.  We have come, indeed, into a sense of such certain brotherhood that we know your hell is a falsity.  We know—­a knowledge of even the rudiments of psychology proves—­that there will be a hell for all as long as one of us is there.  Our human nature is such that one soul in hell would put every other soul there.  Daily this becomes more apparent.  We grow constantly more sensitive to the pain of others.  This is the distinctive feature of modern growth—­our increasing tendency to find the sufferings of others intolerable to ourselves.  A disaster now is felt around the world—­we burn or starve or freeze or drown with our remote brothers—­and we do what we can to relieve them because we suffer with them.  It seems to me the existence of the S.P.C.A. proves that hell is either for all of us or for none of us—­because of our oneness.  If the suffering of a stray cat becomes our suffering, do you imagine that the minority of the race which Christianity saves could be happy knowing that the great majority lay in torment?

“Suppose but two were left in hell—­Judas Iscariot and Herbert Spencer—­the first great sinner after Jesus and the last of any consequence.  One betrayed his master and the other did likewise, only with far greater subtlety and wickedness—­teaching thousands to disbelieve his claims to godhood—­to regard Christianity as a crude compound of Greek mythology and Jewish tradition—­a thing built of myth and fable.  Even if these two were damned and all the rest were saved—­can you not see that a knowledge of their suffering would embitter heaven