't deny there are good points about you, but that
isn't enough. Sometimes you are detestable!"

"I see what you mean," said Barthrop; "but you don't hate people--you only
hate things in them and about them. It is just a selection."

"Not at all," said Father Payne. "How are you going to separate people's
qualities and attributes from themselves? It is a process of addition and
subtraction, if you like. There may be a balance in your favour. But when a
bad mood is on, when a person is bilious, fractious, ugly, cross, you hate
him. It is natural to do so, and it is right to do so. I do loathe this
talk of mild, weak, universal love. The only chance of human beings getting
on at all, or improving at all, is that they should detest what is
detestable, as they abominate a bad smell. The only reason why we are clean
is because we have gradually learnt to hate bad smells. A bad smell means
something dangerous in the background--so do ugliness, ill-health, bad
temper, vanity, greediness, stupidity, meanness. They are all danger
signals. We have no business to ignore them, or to forget them, or to make
allowances for them. They are all part of the beastliness of the world."

"But if we believe in God, and in God's goodness--if He does not hate
anything which He has made," said Lestrange rather ruefully, "ought we not
to try to do the same?"

"My dear Lestrange," said Father Payne, "one would think you were teaching
a Sunday-school class! How do you know that God made the nasty things? One
must not think so ill of Him as that! It is better to think of God as
feeble and inefficient, than to make Him responsible for all the filth and
ugliness of the world. He hates them as much as you do, you may be sure of
that--and is as anxious as you are, and a great deal more anxious, to get
rid of them. God is infinitely more concerned about it, much more
disappointed about it, than you or me. Why, you and I are often taken in.
We don't always know when things are rotten. I have made friends before now
with people who seemed charming, and I have found out that I was wrong. But
I do not think that God is taken in. It is a very mixed affair, of course;
but one thing is clear, that something very filthy is discharging itself
into the world, like a sewer into a river, I am not going to credit God
with that; He is trying to get rid of it, you may be sure, and He cannot do
it as fast as He would like. We have got to sympathise with Him, and we
ha