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.

The man who is proud of our Christian civilisation has ideals susceptible
of immense elevation. Christianity has more souls in its hell and fewer in
its heaven than any other religion whatsoever. Naturally, Christian
society is one of extremes and of gross injustice--of oppression and
indifference to suffering. And so it will be until this materialism of
separation is repudiated: until we turn seriously to the belief