But the children haven't eaten anything, and are so far innocent. The second reason why I won't speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation - they've eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become 'like gods.' They go on eating it still.

But, in the first place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly). Still we'd better keep to the children, though it does weaken my case. That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of the children. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. If it were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then one might like looking at them. One can love one's neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers. And so he deprives me instantly of his favour, and not at all from badness of heart. Besides, there is suffering and suffering degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me - hunger, for instance - my benefactor will perhaps allow me but when you come to higher suffering - for an idea, for instance - he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea. Why won't he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. And what's more, a man is rarely ready to admit another's suffering (as though it were a distinction). Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely.

To my thinking, Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible on earth. The question is, whether that's due to men's bad qualities or whether it's inherent in their nature. 'Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can't understand it, and the innumerable mass of mankind are with me there. But yet there's a great deal of love in mankind, and almost Christ-like love. 'Father Zossima has talked of that more than once,' observed Alyosha 'he, too, said that the face of a man often hinders many people not practised in love, from loving him.

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