It must be confessed that, in regard to the reconciliation of the claims
of intense human affection with those of intense sanctity, there have
been among all religious teachers two distinct conceptions struggling
for birth, often in one and the same mind, either of which taken as
adequate must exclude the other. It would not be hard to quote the
utterances of saints and ascetics for either view; or to convict
individual authorities of seeming self-contradiction in the matter. The
reason of this is apparently that neither view is or can be adequate;
that one is weak where the other is strong; that they are both imperfect
analogies of a relationship that is unique and _sui generis_--the
relationship between God and the soul. Hence neither hits the centre of
truth, but glances aside, one at the right hand, the other at the left.
Briefly, it is a question of the precise sense in which God is "a
jealous God" and demands to be loved alone. The first and easier mode of
conception is that which is implied in the commoner language of saints
and ascetics--language perhaps consciously symbolic and defective in its
first usage, but which has been inevitably literalised and hardened when
taken upon the lips of the multitude. God is necessarily spoken of and
imagined in terms of the creature, and when the analogical character of
such expression slips from consciousness, as it does almost instantly,
He is spoken of, and therefore thought of, as the First of Creatures
competing with the rest for the love of man's heart. He is placed
alongside of them in our imagination, not behind them or in them. Hence
comes the inference that whatever love they win from us in their own
right, by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him. Even
though He be loved better than all of them put together, yet He is not
loved perfectly till He be loved alone. Their function is to raise and
disappoint our desire time after time, till we be starved back to Him as
to the sole-satisfying--everything else having proved _vanitas