An optimistic moralist would say that I loved
Alec too selfishly, and even that the love of the child turned away
my heart from the jealous Heart of God, who demands a perfect
surrender, a perfect love. But how can one love that which one does
not know or understand, a Power that walks in darkness and that
gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and desirable things,
and on the other strikes them from us when we need them most? It is
not as if I did not desire to trust and love God utterly. I should
think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it gave me a pure
and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But instead of
that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful resistance.
I do not feel that there is anything which God could send me or
reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or
injustice. I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and
love Him when I do not. He may crush me with repeated blows of His
hand, but He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing,
of balancing; and I must use it even in His despite. He does not
require, I think, a dull and broken submissiveness, the
submissiveness of the creature that is ready to admit anything, if
only he can be spared another blow.
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