There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who have been so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.
This observation is interesting because it starts to show the difference between understanding the message of God and trying to prove the existence of God. By definition, faith is the process of believing in something that one cannot see. There is no evidence of something that we have faith in. The main way that we have to show our faith in God is to believe in his existence without proof of it. This is one way in which those who are preoccupied with proving that God exists are forgetting to connect with God themselves.
The same could be said for those who seek to convert as many people to Christianity as they can, without remembering what the teachings of Christ actually are. There were many examples of Christian missionaries doing an awful lot of harm to the individual or to the community that they were working in. This is contrary to the message of Christ which is to do good. In trying to convert people to Christianity, this message was often lost and missionaries became so fixated on numbers that they did not stop to think if they were acting in a Christian way.
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.
The Narrator here throws up an interesting observation; people who do not like manifestations of goodness, or those who continue to tell others what good people they are, are often nearer to God than those who consider themselves to be good without stopping to consider what being good actually entails. It is not enough just to call oneself good; one must also follow carefully what God considers good. Those who realize they have not always shown goodness in their life, but repent for it (much like the man who murdered someone but is still in Heaven) they are more likely to get into Heaven than someone who considers himself better than others without looking at whether they needed to repent or not.
