trick, nevertheless; and what sort of God is your God anyway? Now I'll tell you the kind of God I should want my God to be. He'd be a big-hearted, jolly chap, who'd want to see everybody jolly and happy like Himself. He would talk to us about His work, about the seasons and flowers and birds, and so forth, and would say 'Gather round, boys, here's plenty of good victuals, and good wine also—come, put your hand to and help yourselves, and we'll have a pipe and a song and a merry time together.'
No one who really believes in God as an All-benevolent, Almighty Father, and who bears in mind Morris' inherently childlike way of looking at all things from a human level, will be disposed to see anything irreverent in this outburst. His whole conception of life as consisting in fellowship, in doing things to make oneself and one's fellows happy, his hatred of cruelty and oppression, selfishness, sordidness and ugliness in every form, was, if not religion itself, at least that without which religion becomes an illogical and unfeeling pietism or pretence. And it would be hard for any theologian whose creed is in accord with the laudatory psalms, the Messianic prophecies, and the essential teaching of the Gospels, to deny that in Morris' conception of what life on earth should be, and could be, there is a much nearer approach to the true Kingdom of God than is to be found in most of the conventional devotionalism of the Churches.
Yet many who are quite ready to see in what Morris called his 'paganism' a religion of life, consistent as far as it goes with the highest spiritual ideals, are disappointed by the absence in him of apparently any interest in beliefs and hopes concerning invisible things, concerning the great questions of the existence of the world, of life, of death, of eternity—questions which have pressed on the minds of the great thinkers and poets of all ages from Job and Aeschylus, Socrates and Omar Khayyám, Dante and Shakespeare, Spinoza and Milton, Hegel and Shelley. This sense of disappointment with the lack of any spiritual purpose or spiritual hope in Morris' teaching is, if I am
