CHAPTER IV

God as Atoner

i. General Considerations

We have frequently pointed out, and the remark cannot be too often made, for the point is absolutely cardinal, that the minute you leave the purely physical category and enter the moral one, that moment everything becomes changed. The centre of gravity being altered, the whole system shifts, and our thought must undergo a corresponding modification or be guilty of the most serious inconsistencies and errors. Now the physical category is concerned with the mutual relations of inanimate things, or the relation of thinking beings with inanimate things, such as the action of a player on the ball, or the action of a falling stone upon a person. It will be seen that such relations do not go beyond the sphere of the mechanical. They have, in themselves, nothing to do with the moral.

But the minute you enter the moral sphere, that is, that which concerns the reciprocal relations of moral beings, animate, conscious, rational, you find that the simple judgement concerning, for example, strength and weakness, has to be tremendously modified. In the physical sphere, for example,

the question of relative strength can be settled by a tug, by a display of muscular force, by a decisive impact. But how ridiculous it would be to assert that moral questions can be so settled; or that when you wish to assert your moral superiority over somebody else, or to win him morally, you can do so by a display of superior physical force! The idea is absurd. On the contrary, the means you employ may seem, in the physical sphere, to be sheer weakness. At all events, moral means are very numerous and very different and delicate and complicated, while physical means are always simple and the same in character, because they have no other criterion than physical force, which is always calculated according to purely mathematical laws.

The cardinal mistake of Islam, as we have seen, and the cardinal point of difference between it and Christianity is that the former conceives the relations between God and man to fall wholly within the physical category (with the result, of course, that it makes men things, not persons); while Christianity insists that men are persons, and that the relation between them and their Creator must be fundamentally moral. The forces, therefore, that God exerts on man will not be purely physical in character, a contest of strength with strength; nor yet merely psychical, as though it were a contest between a strong intellect and a weak one; but moral. And from this the profoundest differences spring between what Islam regards as befitting