Then, the Christian says, that other aspect of the love of God, which in fact is only other because we speak of it as though it were and look at it in a special point of view, his atonement or reconciliation of man with himself, comes into play. Here, too, love seeks to win love, will invites the co-operation of will, and wisdom pleads. No mechanism, no compulsion, nothing arbitrary or even commanding. 'Come unto me,' he says. And every effort love can make that man may be won is made, even to that of the agony and death of the lover that the loved one may be rescued from slavery to self, and brought into the life of love and the liberty wherewith Christ would make him free.
A deepening enslavement by sin, or a growing liberty in vital union with the Christ of God—these are the alternatives put before us in the Christian religion. And again we see life—or shall we say God?—striving to give freedom, yet with no preordained success. As in the plants and beasts life found no open way for that advance, so, although in man the way was found, men can bring it to an end merely by desiring and seeking no more than gratification of the narrow interests of a self that is bounded by self-seeking. It seems that life can be as effectually checked by this as, in a lower order, it was checked by the coating of cellulose on the vegetable cell. It is possible for a man so to imprison himself in self as to shut out God, so to build a wall about himself as to cut off from his life that fountain of living waters on which its advance and true continuance depend. He contracts into an eddy, a circling stream narrowed within set boundaries of himself. He becomes as the lower beasts, but worse than they because he is no beast.
The Christian says that when this process of cutting off and shutting out reaches completion, the man is in hell. And the language of symbol and pictorial imagination has spent itself in trying to express what that really means. Naturally, the symbolism and the painting have varied with the character of imagination at different times and in different nations. What we must tell ourselves is that they are no more than this, and that they may well both falter and fail before a horror so extreme.