“Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the fearless—­the souls God must love most truly were it possible to conceive him setting a difference among his creatures.  Now you drive away even the merely intelligent rabble.  The average man knows your defect—­knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows, indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures upon his puppets.

“This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant.  And you are losing this prestige.  Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and find you wanting—­is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping forth to save himself as best he can.

“But, if you would again draw man, heat him, weld him, hold him—­preach Man to him, show him his own goodness instead of loading him with that vicious untruth of his conception in iniquity.  Preach to him the limitless devotion of his common dull brothers to one another through their sense of oneness.  Show him the common beautiful, wonderful, selfish self-giving of humanity, not for an hour or for a day, but for long hard life-times.  Preach the exquisite adjustment of that human nature which must always seek its own happiness, yet is slowly finding that that happiness depends on the happiness of all.  The lives of daily crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you—­you all know them.  And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human nature—­of the man in the street—­no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will ever again move you as these do.  And when you have preached this long enough, then will take place in human society, naturally, spontaneously, that great thing which big men have dreamed of doing with their artificial devices of socialism and anarchism.  For when you have demonstrated the race’s eternal oneness man will be as little tempted to oppress, starve, enslave, murder or separate his brothers as he is now tempted to mutilate his own body.  Then only will he love his neighbor as himself—­still with a selfish love.

“Preach Man to man as a discovery in Godhood.  You will not revive the ancient glories of your Church, but you will build a new church to a God for whom you will not need to quibble or evade or apologise.  Then you will make religion the one force, and you will rally to it those great minds whose alienation has been both your reproach and your embarrassment.  You will enlist not only the scientist but the poet—­and all between.  You will have a God to whom all confess instinctively.”

CHAPTER XV

THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE PATH

He stopped, noticing that the chairs were pushed back.  There was an unmistakeable air of boredom, though one or two of the men still smoked thoughtfully.  One of these, indeed—­the high church rector—­even came back with a question, to the undisguised apprehension of several brothers.