“If a man believed in a God that did not heed the suffering of the creation, one who made men and women and beasts knowing that they must suffer, and suffer only--and went on believing so however you set him thinking about it, I should say to him, 'You believe in a devil, and so are in the way to become a devil yourself.' A thousand times rather would I believe that there was no God, and that the misery came by chance from which there was no escape. What I do believe is, that there is a God who is even now doing his best to take all men and all beasts out of the misery in which they find themselves.” “But why did he let them come into it?” “That the God will tell them, to their satisfaction, so soon as ever they shall have become capable of understanding it. There must be things so entirely beyond our capacity, that we cannot now see enough of them to be able even to say that they are incomprehensible. There must be millions of truths that have not yet risen above the horizon of what we call the finite.” “Then you would not think a person so very, very wicked, for not believing in a God?” “That depends on the sort of God he fancied himself asked to believe in. Would you call a Greek philosopher wicked for not believing in Mercury or Venus? If a man had the same notion of God that I have, or anything like it, and did not at least desire that there might be such a God, then I confess I should have difficulty in understanding how he could be good. But the God offered him might not be worth believing in, might even be such that it was a virtuous act to refuse to believe in him.” “One thing more, Mr. Wingfold--and you must not think I am arguing against you or against God, for if I thought there was no God, I should just take poison:--tell me, mightn't a man think the idea of such a God as you believe in, too good to be true?” “I should need to know something of his history, rightly to understand that. Why should he be able to think anything too good to be true? Why should a thing not be true because it was good? It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something under the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it. But if the man really thought as you suggest, I would say to him, 'You cannot _know_ such a being does not exist: is it possible you should be content that such a being should not exist? If such a being did exist, would you be content never to find him, but to go on for ever and ever saying, _He can't be! He can't be! He's so good he can't be!_ Supposing you find one day that there he is, will your defence before him be satisfactory to yourself: “There he is after all, but he was too good to believe in, therefore I did not try to find him”? Will you say to him--“_If you had not been so good, if you had been a little less good, a little worse, just a trifle bad, I could and would have believed in you?”_'”