fanciful. Without going further than this, you
can become a follower of Jesus just as you can become a follower of
Confucius or Lao Tse, and may therefore call yourself a Jesuist, or even
a Christian, if you hold, as the strictest Secularist quite legitimately
may, that all prophets are inspired, and all men with a mission,
Christs.

The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to the child, first
the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields and seasons as witness to
its eternal truth. Then, as the child's mind matures, it can learn, as
historical and psychological phenomena, the tradition of the scapegoat,
the Redeemer, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and
how, in a world saturated with this tradition, Jesus has been largely
accepted as the long expected and often prophesied Redeemer, the
Messiah, the Christ. It is open to the child also to accept him. If the
child is built like Gladstone, he will accept Jesus as his Savior,
and Peter and John the Baptist as the Savior's revealer and forerunner
respectively. If he is built like Huxley, he will take the secular view,
in spite of all that a pious family can do to prevent him. The important
thing now is that the Gladstones and Huxleys should no longer waste
their time irrelevantly and ridiculously wrangling about the Gadarene
swine, and that they should make up their minds as to the soundness of
the secular doctrines of Jesus; for it is about these that they may come
to blows in our own time.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE.

Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions have so
suddenly lost countenance that although, to the utter disgrace of the
nation's leaders and rulers, the laws by which persecutors can destroy
or gag all freedom of thought and speech in these matters are still
unrepealed and ready to the hand of our bigots and fanatics (quite
recently a respectable shopkeeper was convicted of "blasphemy" for
saying that if a modern girl accounted for an illicit pregnancy by
saying she had conceived of the Holy Ghost, we should know what to
think: a remark which would never have occurred to him had he been
properly taught how the story was grafted on the gospel), yet somehow
they are used only against poor men, and that only in a half-hearted
way. When we consider that from the time when the first scholar ventured
to whisper as a professional secret that the Pentateuch could
not possibly have been written by Moses to the tim