Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it. That is no reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the essentials of religion. For women much more than for men is this confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate their lives instead of God. “He for God only; she for God in him,” phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula of sexual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end of Goethe’s Faust (“The woman soul leadeth us upward and on”) may witness. The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the healthy love of ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is an essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference, exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter. The former is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of individuality. It may be true that a few men and more women do achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly love. So the poets and romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a worship that should be reserved for God and a devotion that is normally evoked only by little children in their mother’s heart. It is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this world. But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self. CHAPTER THE SIXTH MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION 1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain and read Metchnikoff’s “Nature of Man,” he will find there an interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity. With an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff demonstrates that life is a system of “disharmonies,” capable of no perfect way, that there is no “perfect” dieting, no “perfect” sexual life, no “perfect” happiness, no “perfect” conduct. He releases one from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an ideal “perfection” in organic life. He sweeps out of the mind with all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man. It is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from perfection. From the biological point of view we are as individuals a series of involuntary “tries” on the part of an imperfect species towards an unknown end.