“but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my father, which is in heaven.”

Is it God speaking—­or man? “Do not even the publicans so?”

Beside this very human contradiction, it is hardly worth while to hear him say “Resist not evil,” yet make a scourge of cords to drive the money-changers from the temple in a fit of rage, human—­but how ungodlike!

Believe me, the man Jesus is better than the god Jesus; the man is worth while, for all his inconsistencies, partly due to his creed and partly to his emotional nature.  Indeed, we have not yet risen to the splendour of his ideal—­even the preachers will not preach it.

And the miracles?  We need say nothing of those, I think.  If a man disprove his godship out of his own mouth, we shall not be convinced by a coin in a fish’s mouth or by his raising Lazarus, four days dead.  So long as he says, “I will confess him that confesseth me and deny him that denieth me,” we should know him for one of us, though he rose from the dead before our eyes.

Then at the last you will say, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”  Well, sir, the fruits of Christianity are what one might expect.  You will say it stands for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  That it has always done the reverse is Christianity’s fundamental defect, and its chief absurdity in this day when the popular unchurchly conception of God has come to be one of some dignity.

“That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”  There is the rock of separation upon which the Church builded; the rock upon which it will presently split.  The god of the Jews set a difference between Israel and Egypt.  So much for the fatherhood of God.  The Son sets the same difference, dividing the sheep from the goats, according to the opinions they form of his claim to godship.  So much for the brotherhood of man.  Christianity merely caricatures both propositions.  Nor do I see how we can attain any worthy ideal of human brotherhood while this Christianity prevails:  We must be sheep and goats among ourselves, some in heaven, some in hell, still seeking out reasons “Why the Saints in Glory Should Rejoice at the Sufferings of the Damned.”  We shall be saints and sinners, sated and starving.  A God who separates them in some future life will have children that separate themselves here upon His own very excellent authority.  That is why one brother of us must work himself to death while another idles himself to death—­because God has set a difference, and his Son after him, and the Church after that.  The defect in social Christendom to-day, sir, is precisely this defect of the Christian faith—­its separation, its failure to teach what it chiefly boasts of teaching.  We have, in consequence, a society of thinly veneered predatoriness.  And this, I believe, is why our society is quite as unstable today as the Church itself.  They are both awakening to a new truth—­which is not separation.