Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track.  Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide:  had it perhaps felt it for the same reason?  Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express—­this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things?  Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine.  Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world.  The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four.  What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.  If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age.  If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing.  A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century.  But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century.  It is simply a matter of a man’s theory of things.  Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question.  And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity.  They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them.  They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity.  They will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity.  Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind.  Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.  Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity