In testing Christianity, then, I remark first that it is to be tested not by creeds, but by conduct.  The evidence of the gospel, the reality of the gospel that is preached in schools or churches, is to be found in the spirit that is developed by it, not in the technical creeds that men have constructed out of it.  The biography of men who have died might be hung up in their sepulchres; but you could not tell what kind of a man this one had been, just by reading his life there—­while he lay dead in dust before you.  There are thousands of churches that have a creed of Christianity hung up in them, but the church itself is a sepulchre full of dead men’s bones; and indeed, many churches in modern times are gnawing the bones of their ancestors, and doing almost nothing else.

The gospel, changed from a spirit of humanity into a philosophical system of doctrine, is perverted.  It is not the gospel.  The great heresy in the world of religion is a cold heart, not a luminous head.  It is not that intelligence is of no use in religion.  By no means.  Neither would we wage a crusade against philosophical systems of moral truth.  But where the active sympathy and humanity of loving hearts for living men, and for men in the ratio in which they are low, is laid aside or diminished to a minimum, and in its place is a well-elaborated philosophical system of moral truths, hewn and jointed,—­the gospel is gone.  If you go along the sea-shores, you will often find the shells of fish—­the fish dead and gone, the shells left.  And if you go along the shores of ecclesiastical organization, you will find multitudes of shells of the gospel, out of which the living substance has gone long ago.  Organized Christianity—­that is, the institutions of Christianity have been in the first instance its power, and in the second instance its damnation.  The moment you substitute the machinery of education for education itself, the moment you build schools and do not educate, build colleges that do not increase knowledge in the pupils, you have sacrificed the aim for the instrument by which you were to gain that aim.  In churches, the moment it is more important to maintain buildings, rituals, ministers, chanters, and all the paraphernalia of moral education than the spirit of personal sympathy, the moment these are more sacred to men than is the welfare of the population round about which they were set to take care of, that very moment Christ is dead in that place; that very moment religion in the midst of all its institutions has perished.  I am bound to say that in the history of the world, while religious institutions have been valuable and have done a great deal of good, they have perhaps done as much harm as good.  There is scarcely one single perversion of civil government, there is scarcely one single persecution of men, there is scarcely a single one of the great wars that have depopulated the globe, there is scarcely one great heresy developed out of the tyranny of the church, that has not been the fruit of institutional religion; while that spirit of humanity which was to give the institution its motive power has to a certain extent died out of it.