Suppose you have a virus that tells you other people are always talking about you and plotting against you. Doctors label this thinking paranoid. They don't think of you at all. This is common among those of the Methodist tradition. It often causes a cancer of the mind, turning us against ourselves.
Guilt can be most destructive of our wellbeing, causing mental and physical illness.
Most of my ministry has been spent trying to help people cope with guilt trips laid on them by well-meaning people when they were children. I'm sure each reader can add to my list of 'mind viruses' ad infinitum. If the God he believes in is too small and mean, the more intensely he holds his belief and cultivates it the smaller and meaner he will be. Men have believed in a cruel God who will send a large part of the human race to an endless hell, and by this belief all their cruelty was confirmed. They got the idea that torture chambers of earth were but replicas of the great torture chamber of God.