rnal perdition, but whose faith I can
now be punished for disparaging by a provocative word, and you have a
total of over three hundred and forty-two and a quarter million heretics
to swamp our forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way, only six
thousand call themselves distinctively "disciples of Christ," the rest
being members of the Church of England and other denominations whose
discipleship is less emphatically affirmed. In short, the Englishman of
today, instead of being, like the forefathers whose ideas he clings to,
a subject of a State practically wholly Christian, is now crowded, and
indeed considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an Empire in which
the Christians are a mere eleven per cent of the population; so that the
Nonconformist who allows his umbrella stand to be sold up rather than
pay rates towards the support of a Church of England school, finds
himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but
to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for
sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times
more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own
history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers
and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty
millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is about
one hundred and fourteen millions. The French are not in our hopeless
Christian minority of eleven per cent; but they are in a minority of
thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And, being a more
logical people than we, they have officially abandoned Christianity and
declared that the French State has no specific religion.

Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No doubt there
are many innocent people in England who take Charlemagne's view, and
would, as a matter of course, offer our eighty-nine per cent of "pagans,
I regret to say" the alternative of death or Christianity but for a
vague impression that these lost ones are all being converted gradually
by the missionaries. But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously
parochial delusions. No English king or French president can possibly
govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul, Luther and
Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ is more than the
Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus more or less human than
Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is actual