but
that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents
for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that
omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God,
to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all
creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that
the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this indeed I
approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I
apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent
touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly
feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a
distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some
unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is
written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy
God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in
Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted
God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of
pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it
was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which
confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists
choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the
world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of
unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been
in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech) but
let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one
divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which
God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which the
chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform;
and of which the chief defect is that it is obviously only an abstract
assertion. Its main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and
manly of all theologies. Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a
theology. It can always be urged against it that it is in its nature
arbitrary and in the air. But it is not so high in the air but that
great archers spend their whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and
their last arr