ey
meet someone with an equal admiration for the poems of Robert Browning;
or the Russian Ballet, or one who places the music of Debussy above the
music of Wagner. But, I fear, they are often disappointed. For the
longer I live, the more convinced I become that Love and Friendship are
but "day dreams" of the "soul,"--that all we can ever possess in Life
is the second-best of both. Nobody in Love, or in the first throes of
a new friendship, will believe me, of course. Why should they? There
are moments in both love and friendship when the "dream" does seem to
become a blissful reality. But they pass--they pass . . . leaving us
once more lonely in the wilderness of the Everyday, wondering if, after
all, those splendid moments which are over were ever anything more than
merely the figments of our own imagination and had nothing whatever to
do with the love we believed was ours, the friendship which seemed to
come towards us with open arms--that the Dream and the Hope, and the
fulfilment of both, merely lived and died in our own hearts alone--in
our own hearts and nowhere . . . alas! nowhere else. I often think it
must be so. Our love is always the same; only the loved-one changes.
God alone is a permanent Ideal because He lives within us--we never
meet Him as a separate entity. Thus we can never become disillusioned.

_Love of God_

Yet, it seems to me sometimes that even our ideal of God changes with
the fleeting years. When we were young, and because He was thus
presented to us by our spiritual pastors and masters, we figured Him as
some tragically revengeful elderly gentleman, who appeared to show His
love for us by always being exceedingly vindictive. Then when Fate, as
it were, thrust us from the confines of our homes into the storm of
life alone, we came to think of the God-Ideal in blind anger. We cried
that He was dead, or deaf; that He was not a God of Love at all, but
cruel . . . more cruel than Mankind. Sometimes we denied that He had
ever existed at all; that all the Church told us about Him was so much
"fudge," and that Heaven and Hell, the punishment of Sin, the reward of
Virtue, were all part of the Great Human Hoax by which Man is cheated
and ensnared. "We will be hoaxed no more!" we cried, little realising
that this is invariably the Second Stage along the road by which
thinking men approaches God.

The Third Stage, when it came, found us older, wiser, far less inclined
to cry "Damn"