bookstalls and shops,
they seem to find a fairly large public to-day. Thinking is as needful
an exercise for the mind as work is for the body, and the only plausible
ground on which you can seek to suppress thinking about Christianity is
the fear that it will not be good for Christianity.

Then we shall have the next and inevitable question: What would you put
in the place of Christianity? Young men in various parts of the country
hurl that question at one as if it were really very serious, putting an
end to all dispute. Any person who is quite candid and sincere about
these matters can find the material for an answer easily enough. Take
France. Forty years ago the nation was overwhelmingly Christian; to-day
it is overwhelmingly non-Christian. It has not put anything in the place
of Christianity, and has prospered remarkably. There is a legacy of what
is called vice which comes down from earlier religious times, but any
person who cares to examine criminal and other statistics, the only
positive tests of a nation's health, will find that France has been
extraordinarily successful without Christianity and without putting
anything in its place. There are, it is true, moral lessons in its
schools, but I would not claim that they are much responsible: the
system is imperfect, and the teachers not well equipped. Take our ally
Japan. The moral discipline of the nation, which, in spite of some
recent deterioration through Western influence, is admirable, does not
rest on religious foundations. Take London or any metropolis of modern
Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from
the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress
instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or
Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in
more religious times.

This experience might be enlarged indefinitely, but one or two instances
will suffice for my purpose. The soundness of these instances which I
quote I have established elsewhere, and the general truth to which I
refer may be sufficiently gathered from the words of the clergy
themselves. The rhetorical way in which they characterise our times is
more or less typical of the carelessness of their judgments and the
strength of their prejudices. One group of clerical writers, which
generally includes the reigning Pope, speak in the darkest terms of our
age and suggest that a sensible degeneration ha