“The father tempted the prodigal,” he said, “when he gave him the substance to waste with sinners.  Did the father sin?  The time had come when nothing but temptation—­yes, and sin too—­could save.  Most things, sir, that you hold about God I can hold too.  There are bad men, powerful and seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils.  There is hell on earth, and I don’t doubt but that there’s the awfulest, longest depth of the same kind of hell beyond.  There’s heaven on earth, and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there’s heaven beyond, unspeakable and eternal; but, sir, when you come to limit God—­to say, here the responsibility of the faithful God stops, here man’s self-destruction begins—­I can’t believe that.  He must be responsible, not only for starting us with freedom, but responsible for the use we make of it and for all the consequence.  When you say of the infinite God that hell and the devils are something outside of Him—­I can’t think that.  The devils must live and move and have their being in Him.  When you say the holy God ever said to spirit He had created, ’Depart from Me’ (except in a parable meaning that as long as a spirit chose evil it would not be conscious of God’s nearness), I tell you, sir, by all He has taught me out of the Bible you gave me, I don’t believe it.  We’ve studied the Bible so much now that we know that holiness is just love—­the sort of love that holds holy hatred and every other good feeling within itself.  We know that love can’t fail and cast out the thing it loves.  When we know a law, we know the way it must work.  If the Bible seems to say the big law it teaches doesn’t work out true, it must be like what is said of the six days of creation, something that came as near as it could to what people would understand, but that needs a new explanation.”

The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm.  He sat looking very stern and sad.

“When you begin to doubt God’s word, you will soon doubt that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that seek Him.”

“Sir, it seems to me that it’s doubting the incarnate Word to believe what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is contradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because they thought them.  But it’s not that I would set myself up to know about doctrines, if it wasn’t that this doctrine had driven me to stop believing and stop caring to do right.  I can’t just explain it clearly, but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you told me, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love of God as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was a something—­I didn’t know exactly what—­that I couldn’t bring my mind to; so I just left it.  But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, then it came on me all of a sudden that I didn’t want a God who had to do with such a little part of life as that.  You see it had been simmering in my mind all the days