fighting too little, but for fighting too much.  Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars.  Christianity had deluged the world with blood.  I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry.  And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.  The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades.  It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.  The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes.  What could it all mean?  What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars?  What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?  In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness?  The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith.  The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion.  The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people.  Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe.  I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies—­ I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience.  Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them.  The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense.  It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing “Thou shalt not steal.”  It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be “Little boys should tell the truth.”  I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still—­with other things.  And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason.  But then I found an astonishing thing.  I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.  If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers