not too much

Who that knows anything of the conditions of human knowledge, of the difficulties of the search for truth, and of the innumerable influences that affect human beliefs, can for a moment think that . . . theological errors, even the gravest in our eyes, are sins to be punished rather than simply calamities to be pitied? No one acquainted with the theological literature of our day but must be aware how grave, thoughtful, earnest -- how utterly different from the offensive levity or ribald flippancy of a former time -- is the tone of many who have been led farthest aside from the path of what we deem the orthodox faith, the tone of such thinkers as Carlyle and Sterling and Clough and the brothers Newman. . . . Can we apply to such men, or think of God as applying to them, the same anathema that is pronounced on the profligate and the vile? . . . Is it not, I do not say more charitable, but more truly reverential to think that these errors and difficulties are but the discipline by which the God of Truth is leading them onwards to Himself, and that in His own time and way, here or hereafter, from the labyrinth in which they seem to be lost, His loving hand will guide them out into the light of that eternal truth for which here they have so passionately yet so vainly longed? I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord; all my hopes for humanity are centred in the gospel of His grace; but it would be a greater denial of that God and Saviour, it would be to ascribe to His nature an incongruity and self-contradiction more monstrous than to deny Him altogether, to conceive Him casting into irrevocable darkness souls that here in vain have been groping after the light. I do not hesitate to say that it were better to perish with the unbeliever than to be saved with the believer in such a God as this.