it was impossible to be free.  One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise.  This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent.  Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world.  The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.  If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.  I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed—­

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath.”

But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.  The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark.  And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.  The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist.  I thought there must be something wrong.  And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools.  I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out.  A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did.  A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.  At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind.  I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called “Christian,” especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.  The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.  Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men.  In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.  The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.  I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it.  But I read something very different.  I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down.  Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for