have a
right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable
natural right to say "No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral
responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat
with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew
they would cost me nothing." Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen:
that iron moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an
ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying the
price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a present
instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we accepted the
contempt of the Power on whose pity we were trading; but to bargain for
a crown of glory as well! that was too much for Ibsen: it provoked him
to exclaim, "Your God is an old man whom you cheat," and to lash the
deadened conscience of the XIX century back to life with a whip of
scorpions.

THE TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY.

And there I must leave the matter to such choice as your nature allows
you. The honest teacher who has to make known to a novice the facts
about Christianity cannot in any essential regard, I think, put the
facts otherwise than as I have put them. If children are to be delivered
from the proselytizing atheist on the one hand, and the proselytizing
nun in the convent school on the other, with all the other proselytizers
that lie between them, they must not be burdened with idle controversies
as to whether there was ever such a person as Jesus or not. When Hume
said that Joshua's campaigns were impossible, Whately did not wrangle
about it: he proved, on the same lines, that the campaigns of Napoleon
were impossible. Only fictitious characters will stand Hume's sort of
examination: nothing will ever make Edward the Confessor and St.
Louis as real to us as Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick. We must cut the
controversy short by declaring that there is the same evidence for the
existence of Jesus as for that of any other person of his time; and
the fact that you may not believe everything Matthew tells you no more
disproves the existence of Jesus than the fact that you do not believe
everything Macaulay tells you disproves the existence of William III.
The gospel narratives in the main give you a biography which is quite
credible and accountable on purely secular grounds when you have trimmed
off everything that Hume or Grimm or Rousseau or Huxley or any modern
bishop could reject as