ut His sense of justice that
had to be appeased and satisfied, which was a distinct step in advance.

A little later, however, I read that this was not the hidden truth of
the doctrine. The religious world (the thoughtful section of it) now
arrived at the idea that it was not God who needed to be satisfied or
appeased in any of His attributes, but MAN, and that GOD--in the person
of his Son--came into the world to reconcile the world to Him, and not
Himself to the world.

This was a complete _bouleversement_ of the whole situation, though it
came so gradually that few appreciated that fact.

The last suggestion appeared to me by far the most luminous. In human
life it is invariably the _lower_ nature that needs to be reconciled and
conciliated; whilst the higher nature, in proportion to its
development, is forgiving and tolerant and wide-minded, and does not
prate about its own high sense of justice requiring to be appeased. The
best type of _man_ punishes a wrong-doer in order that he may learn to
do better and leave off tormenting and wronging his fellow-creatures;
not to appease any instinct in his own breast, for that would be
egotism, no matter how we might try to disguise the fact.

Now if it would be a blot upon the best conceivable _man_ to be
egotistical, _a fortiori_ must it be upon God.

To conceive otherwise is to make God in the likeness of the lower and
not the higher humanity. I thought all that out very clearly.

Still this crux remained for me, that to be suddenly, at any arbitrary
moment in the world's history, obliged, as it were, to send an
absolutely divine part of Himself into the world, was the way a _man_
would act faced by an unforeseen catastrophe, but not the way in which
God has acted throughout the rest of our history.

A succession of teachers, enlightening the world by degrees, and
culminating in the ANOINTED Son of God--the Flower of Humanity--_this_
is entirely in line with the processes of Nature and the laws of God, so
far as we know them.

All progress has its culminating point.

AEons have passed to produce the most exquisite crystals, the highest
forms of vegetation, of animals, of men. Then came the slow processes of
civilising and educating men; the dim instincts of fear and
propitiation, merging, by slow degrees, in the first conceptions of
Love, as something apart from desire, and so forth.

Was I to be expected to shut my eyes to all these known facts, and bolt
down