modern conditions, or to the world at large, we shall find that there is not much left that we can apply to anything. What, indeed, remains? The "spirit" of it all? Yes: but a very different spirit from that which makes these convenient excisions. Many of the alleged excuses for the failure of Christianity have been pitched in this key. They are unconvincing.

Others fall back on the magic words "slow and gradual," words that have induced many persons to believe that the slower and more gradual a process is the more surely it is divine—as against an earlier thought which armed the gods with thunderbolts. The convenience of this excuse is that no depth of failure can be so extreme as not to be covered by it—just as, in the case cited above, no betrayal of Christ's principles can be so complete as not to be covered by the plea that the principles in question "were spoken to particular individuals on particular occasions." But though the one argument is as convenient as the other, it is no more satisfactory to an honest man.

How has it come to pass that respectable Christian apologists have fallen into such flagrant dishonesties?

The cause, I believe, lies in the habit mentioned in the first section of this book—the habit, namely, of applying carnal logic (admirable for carnal purposes) to divine things, not judging spiritual things by spiritual. Anyone who studies this class of apologetics will be struck by their resemblance to a well-known type of political speech, when the spokesman of some discredited Government which has broken all the promises given at the election, attempts to befool his constituents into believing that the promises have been kept. It is all a matter of artfully adjusting the emphasis—the art, as somebody has said "of keeping the public quiet about one thing by making them noisy about another." There is, I say, a significant resemblance between this method and that of the Christian apologist when, for example, he exalts the benevolence promoted by Christianity and ignores the parallel fact that no other religion has developed such ferocious internal differences nor been so cruel in its persecution of unbelievers. There have been moments in the history of Christianity—or of what was called so—when the slaughter of a million men, or the wiping out of an entire civilization, meant no more to the leaders of the Church than it did, by his own confession, to Napoleon. Witness the treatment meted out by Cortes, in the name of Christ and of his Holy Mother, to the Aztecs of Mexico. But the searchlight is seldom switched on to these things, and even when it is "slow and gradual" will cover them.

This application of carnal logic to things divine, this judging the success of Christianity by the standard of success which passes muster in the crime-stained record of human society—as though it were the business of religion to keep pace with the dawdling, creeping, cowardly movement of mankind to better things, and not to hasten it with urgent calls to repent of its hesitancy—this is only one form, though perhaps the crowning form, in which the Kingdom that is not of this world has been surrendered by its deluded guardians to the kingdoms which are. In that surrender, so long an established fact that we have lost sight of its malign implications, so deeply engrained into our mental habits that we have almost forgotten that it exists, lies the true cause of the failure of Christianity, and incidentally of its once atrocious tendency to persecute. For failure most unquestionably there has been: tragic but not irretrievable, if men have the courage to face the facts. Let it be acknowledged! Let an end come swiftly to the invention of sophistries to prove the contrary. That way lies failure deeper still.

The Christian Religion, in the course of its long history, has become entangled with a multitude of things which do not properly belong to it, with philosophies, with dogmatic systems, with political ideas, with the vested interests of great institutions; and especially with the habits of mind which have grown up with these things, this last, the entanglement with deeply entrenched habits of mind, being the most formidable of them all. These entanglements are another name for our perplexities. They are so many and so deep that it becomes a matter of difficulty to extract the original genius of Christianity, to recover its original impulse and power.

It has become the fashion to rejoice in these entanglements. Men say that Christianity, by becoming entangled with these foreign elements, has permeated them with its spirit, acting upon them like leaven and so transfiguring them with its own value. That view I cannot share: at least not without great reservations. Were it not truer to say that these foreign elements, these outside things, these worldly philosophies and institutions, have rather permeated Christianity with their spirit than suffered Christianity to permeate them with its own? No one in his senses will deny that Christianity has done something to make these worldly things better. They would all be much worse than they are if Christianity had never touched them. But, on the other hand, Christianity would be much better than it is if they had never touched it. They have distorted it; have maimed it; have devitalized it at essential points. Dean Inge is speaking the truth when he says that Christianity has become secularized. It has become secularized not only in its outward form, but in something far deeper, namely, in its habits of thought, in its standard of values, and especially in its strivings for power, this last being the characteristic vice of the kingdoms that are of this world. Is it not a fact that for a long time past the Churches of Christendom have been engaged in strife as to who shall be greatest? There can be no surer sign of secularization than that.

Christianity, in the official, or authorized presentation of it, is a smothered religion; smothered almost to the point of total asphyxiation and collapse, but not quite; smothered by the vested interests of great institutions, and by the ambitions, fears and self-seekings that such interests breed; smothered by the elaborate theological defences that Christians have built, not against Antichrist, but against each other; smothered by anxieties, not unnatural in these embroilments, for its own future. If you take Christianity along with its entanglements, encumbrances and unnatural alliances: if you present it with all the secular baggage which the ages have fastened upon it, you will then find it a hopelessly perplexing thing, a thing which neither Reason nor Faith, whether acting singly or in combination, can accept.

But alongside the authorized version, and sometimes hidden within it as an inextinguishable spark of life, Christianity has an unauthorized version, which the former has often repressed, persecuted and condemned to the hangman or to the eternal flames. Of this unauthorized version a fair copy exists in the hearts of men, a fairer copy in the hearts of women, and the fairest copy of all in the hearts of children—for Christianity is preeminently a religion of the young. It is the unauthorized version which has kept Christianity alive through the ages and defied the smotherers even to this day.

Turning to the sources of Christianity in the first three Gospels we are struck by an immense contrast. There is no money in the purse, no victuals in the wallet, no munitions in the magazine, no baggage-train, no commissariat, no provision for trench warfare, and no thought of it. We are in the presence of elemental realities, more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory, more majestic than the successor of St Peter in all his pomp. We are in another atmosphere. All this apparatus of defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies and chapel oppositions,—things which have given a form so strangely artificial to our conceptions of Christianity—are here either secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being concentrated into