Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to most modern books.  A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead.  A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.  But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged.  “That,” says Sherlock Holmes, “is the advantage of being a private detective”; after he has caught he can set free.  The Christian Church can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting that official detective—­the State.  This, indeed, is one of the injustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise from looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact.  We are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews, and so they did.  Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them.  Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did the Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the Chinese.

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and employ cruelty.  But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture, if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain.  The State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal everywhere.  The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon.  The Church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them.  The stake and rack were merely the weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the world.  Its speciality—­or, if you like, its oddity—­was this merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay.

I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in America.  The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure as he passes through a group of Squalid characters.  I have no desire to make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people; that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions have been abrupt.  This saviour’s method of making people good is to tell them how good they are already; and in the case of suicidal outcasts, whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincere self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way.  I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament, because they would so heartily agree with it.