unchanged. When you cannot trust God you cannot trust anything; and when
you cannot trust anything you get the condition of the world as it is
to-day. And that you _cannot_ trust a God whose "love" will paralyse the
hand by which you have to earn a living, or snatch your baby from your
breast--to say nothing of a thousand ingenious forms of torture
inflicted just because "He sees that it is best for you," after having
led you to see otherwise--that you cannot trust a God like that must be
more or less self-evident. If you are part of His Self-Expression He
cannot practise futilities through your experience and personality. He
must be kind with a common-sense kindness, loving with a common-sense
love. Whatever explanation of our sufferings and failures there may be
we must not shuffle them off on God. "Let us hold God to be true," St.
Paul writes, "though every man should prove false."[11] Let us hold that
God would not hurt us, however much we may wilfully hurt each other or
ourselves.

[11] Epistle to the Romans.



V


I should not lay so much emphasis on this if so much emphasis were not
laid on it in the other direction. God has so persistently, and for so
many generations, been held up to us as a God who tries and torments and
punishes that we can hardly see Him as anything else. Torture comes, in
the minds of many of us, to be not only His main function but His only
function. "I am all right," is the unspoken thought in many a heart, "so
long as I am not overtaken by the Will of God. When that calamity falls