The preacher seemed to feel the difficulty dimly, for he fell back upon
the thought that the agony was caused by Christ's bearing the load of
the world's sin. But here again I felt that, after all, sin must have
been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and
all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose
what was not there already in the Mind of God.

And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling
upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus
if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he
is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad
impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to
bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.

And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant
change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark
profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change
in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come
himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the
human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a
helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God,
there is nothing that I could not believe of him.

And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy
and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth
than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the
stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and
preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of
the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of