gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals.  But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.  I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.  But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark.  Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things.  When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had.  We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed.  We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed.  They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming.  It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.  What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?  I saw the same thing on every side.  I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others.  Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children.  But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation.  The charge was actually reversed.  Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman’s intellect.  But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman’s intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that “only women” went to it.  Or again, Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas.  But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold.  It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.  Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that