“For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites of divine goodness?”—_Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_, p. 189. [Sidenote: Unstable equilibrium of the Christian notion of absolute love.] II. Having seen how readily the notion of respect became corrupt in Christianity, let us consider the fate of the notion of love. If the importance which it gave to this principle constitutes the chief honour of Christianity is not the God of the Christians, nevertheless, conceived in a manner inconsistent with the very essence of His being? The God of Christianity, or at least of orthodox Christianity, is a conception of absolute love which involves a contradiction and the destruction of all true fraternity. For the love affirmed to be absolute is in fact limited, since it has to do with a world that is marred by evil, metaphysical, sensible, moral. The love is not even universal, since it is conceived as an especial grace more or less arbitrarily bestowed or withheld, according to the dogma of predestination. The doctrine of grace, round which theology has played with such excess of subtlety, completes the highest principle of morality, the principle of love by the addition of the grossest notion of anthropomorphism: that of favour. God is always conceived on the model of absolute kings who accord favour and disfavour capriciously; one of the most vulgar of sociomorphic relations being chosen, as one perceives, as the true analogue of God’s relation to His creatures. The two elements of the notion of grace are antagonistic to each other. Absolute love is in its nature universal, favouritism is in its nature particular. There are, according to theology, a certain number of beings who are excluded from universal love; the sentence of damnation is in its very essence such an exclusion. Thus understood, divine charity is incompatible with true fraternity, with true charity; for