to its extreme, it rules out friendship and every other communal activity, until in the end a man is reduced to living in a cave on raw cabbage leaves. This was, I suspect, very much the attitude of the desert-fathers; to sacrifice everyone and everything to contemplate God. The short answer is though that God may not want this; he may want a man to marry, and to please his wife and his friends within reason. However so long as the man-in-the-pew thinks only in terms of what he wants himself, the theoretical solution of reconciling God and a wife will appear very difficult, because he will credit God with the same selfish mode of thought. The reconciliation of the conflicting desires of two selfish people is a very difficult problem. The solution to this impasse is to go and ask God what he does want. If God exists, only he can tell the man-in-the-pew what he wants; and if a man and woman care enough about God's wishes, theirs' becomes a mutual joy when they realise that their own wishes are identical, and that they will have to collaborate to bring those wishes into being.
The problem posed by human nature's tendency to betray, (and this includes one's own tendency to betray), is how to strive to create an absolute trust. The basic knowledge which is required to solve this problem is the realisation that seeking absolute trust is not like seeking to balance on some inaccessible pinnacle; absolute trust between two people does not reduce their behaviour to an entirely conventional kind of goodness. Incomplete trust does that; and does it fairly quickly. So people who have only known incomplete trust, in the way that plebeians have, tend to assume that absolute trust is their own spiritual poverty carried to the nth degree. It is nothing of the kind. The more trust there is the less the chance of betrayal; and when you have absolute trust, if there is a breach of faith it is very easily forgiven and repaired, because the regret and contrition is genuine on both sides. Absolute trust between two people results in absolutely spontaneous and unaffected behaviour between them, ….