and second
because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this
monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity
grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one
real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian
religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place,
full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably
be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in
Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed
with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the
doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--I mean the doctrine that
there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the
omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men;
but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and
most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common
sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be
writing "Thou shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest
hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when
deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this
doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral
sense, and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages
and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason.
But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who
said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very
people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was
right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I
was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles
and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly
pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had
always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was
their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one
people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that
it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were
the discovery of one people, and