The second point on which it is necessary to insist is that Christ never expected, or taught His disciples to expect, that His teaching would meet with wide acceptance, or exercise political influence.  ’The world’—­organised human society—­was the enemy and was to continue the enemy.  His message, He foresaw, would be scorned and rejected by the majority; and those who preached it were to expect persecution.  This warning is repeated so often in the Gospels that it would be superfluous to give quotations.  He made it quite plain that the big battalions are never likely to be gathered before the narrow gate.  He declared that only false prophets are well spoken of by the majority.  When we consider the revolutionary character of the Christian idealism, its indifference to nearly all that passes for ‘religion’ with the vulgar, and its reversal of all current valuations, it is plain that it is never likely to be a popular creed.  As surely as the presence of high spiritual instincts in the human mind guarantees its indestructibility, so surely the deeply-rooted prejudices which keep the majority on a lower level must prevent the Gospel of Christ from dominating mundane politics or social life.

Moreover, the actual extent of its influence cannot be estimated.  The inwardness and individualism of its teaching make its apparent effectiveness smaller than its real power, which works secretly and unobserved.  The vices which Christ regarded with abhorrence are perversions of character—­hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, and worldliness or secularity; and who can say what degree of success the Gospel has achieved in combating these?  The method of Christianity is alien to all externalism and machinery; it does not lend itself to those accommodations and compromises without which nothing can be done in politics.  As Harnack says, the Gospel is not one of social improvement, but of spiritual redemption.  Its influence upon social and political life is indirect and obscure, operating through a subtle modification of current valuations, and curbing the competitive and acquisitive instincts, which nearly correspond with what Christ called ‘Mammon’ and St. Paul ‘the flesh.’  Christianity is a spiritual dynamic, which has very little to do directly with the mechanism of social life.

It is, therefore, certain that when we speak of Christianity as a factor in human life, we must not identify it with the opinions or actions of the multitudes who are nominally Christians.  We must not even identify it, without qualification, with the types of character exhibited by those who try to frame their lives in accordance with its precepts.  For these types are very largely determined by the ideals which belong to the stage through which the life of the race is passing; and these differ so widely in different ages and countries that the historian of religion might well despair if he was compelled to regard them all as typical manifestations of the same idea.  There