“Christianity is indeed an optimism about human beings such as only God could conceive. It is not surprising that it seems so unlikely to us. There is no need for the superman if God himself became man. Mere humanism is long since obsolete if in the Son of the Father and of the Virgin humanity is to become God, as the fathers say, if the human being is infinitely more than human… God has come. No one can take him from us and he is everything. He is our brother. So it is right to bear in our own heart our brother’s love of humanity and his kindness, to be gentle and forgiving, hopeful, serene and cheerful, unsuspicious and loyal. God himself has tried this and has told us that it works. His experience is more decisive and credible than ours: we can be better than we think. More can be made of us than we suspect. If Christ is formed in us, we can never form too high a conception of ourselves. We are more than we can imagine.”
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