Hence, says Jesus, he receives "greater damnation" (A.V.)--or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron krima"). The Pharisees were men who believed in God--only that with his world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but indifference to God's facts and to God's nature? If religion is union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament. prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but something else--a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who can be humbugged--or, to come to ourselves, a majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality? For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to God's facts leads to one end only. We admit it ourselves. There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction "in pari materia"; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This serves in some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise. Surely it is because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God. What Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already, but heedless as they were of God's requirements of them, they were not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees. Further, whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.