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I The Problem of Pain, kapittel 4 skriver apologeten og forfatteren:

The examples given in the last chapter went to show that love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable. Now why do we men need so much alteration? The Christian answer - that we have used our free will to become very bad - is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. But to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern men, and even of modern Christians, is very hard. When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the Divine anger. The Pagan mysteries existed to allay this consciousness, and the Epicurean philosophy claimed to deliver men from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to men who knew that they were mortally ill. But all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis - in itself very bad news - before it can win a hearing for the cure.

There are two principal cases. One is the fact that for about hundred years we have so concentrated on on of the virtues - ‘kindness’ or mercy - that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such loopsided ethical developements are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy - for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as ‘Humanitarianism’ and ‘Sentimentality’. The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annyon to him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a convition that ‘his heart’s in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy; it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

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