istianity, in the official, or authorized presentation of it, is a
_smothered_ religion; smothered almost to the point of total
asphyxiation and collapse, but not quite; smothered by the vested
interests of great institutions, and by the ambitions, fears and
self-seekings that such interests breed; smothered by the elaborate
theological defences that Christians have built, not against
Antichrist, but against each other; smothered by anxieties, not
unnatural in these embroilments, for its own future. If you take
Christianity along with its entanglements, encumbrances and unnatural
alliances: if you present it with all the secular baggage which the
ages have fastened upon it, you will then find it a hopelessly
perplexing thing, a thing which neither Reason nor Faith, whether
acting singly or in combination, can accept.

But alongside the authorized version, and sometimes hidden within it as
an inextinguishable spark of life, Christianity has an unauthorized
version, which the former has often repressed, persecuted and condemned
to the hangman or to the eternal flames. Of this unauthorized version
a fair copy exists in the hearts of men, a fairer copy in the hearts of
women, and the fairest copy of all in the hearts of children--for
Christianity is preeminently a religion of the young. It is the
unauthorized version which has kept Christianity alive through the ages
and defied the smotherers even to this day.

Turning to the sources of Christianity in the first three Gospels we
are struck by an immense contrast. There is no money in the purse, no
victuals in the wallet, no munitions in the magazine, no baggage-train,
no commissariat, no provision for trench warfare, and no thought of it.
We are in the presence of elemental realities, more beautiful than
Solomon in all his glory, more majestic than the successor of St Peter
in all his pomp. We are in another atmosphere. All this apparatus of
defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies
and chapel oppositions,--things which have given a form so strangely
artificial to our conceptions of Christianity--are here either
secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being
concentrated into strong Sunday doses, is here a pervasive, unobtrusive
presence, that cometh not with observation, the luminous background of
human conduct, the hiding-place of the light which irradiates the whole
picture of man's life. Even the name of God, which comes t