id and
wretched lives. Christians have been art and part in fostering such
conditions as wrung from compassionate and indignant hearts the _Song
of the Shirt_ and the _Cry of the Children_. Christians have imagined
that correctness of belief would make up for falseness of heart, and
loudness of profession for depravity of {15} practice. Christians have
supposed that in religion all that has to be striven for is the
salvation of one's own soul, have even represented the joy of the
redeemed as heightened by a contemplation of the torments of the lost.
Christians must bear the responsibility of much of the abounding vice
which they have not earnestly tried to combat where it already exists,
and which, in various forms, they have introduced into regions where it
was unknown before. Lawlessness and degradation in the slums, fraud
and dishonesty in trade, gross revelations in the fashionable world;
bigotry, slander, scandals in the ecclesiastical world; plots, wars,
treacheries, assassinations, in the political world: these things ought
not so to be. The fiercest denunciations, the most withering satires,
which unbelievers have employed, do not exceed in intensity of
condemnation the judgment which Christian preachers and Christian
writers have pronounced.[13]

{16}

In all ages of the Church the most powerful weapon against Christianity
has been the example of Christians. The Faith which they nominally
hold has been judged by the lives which they actually lead.[14]
'Christianity,' said a bishop of the eighteenth century, 'would perhaps
be the last religion a wise man would choose, if he were guided by the
lives of those who profess it.'[15] But is this to admit that the hope
of the world lies in renouncing Christianity? that in confining
ourselves to the seen and the temporal, we shall best elevate mankind?
that the prospect of annihilation and the absence of wisdom, love, and
Providence in the order of the universe constitute the most glorious
gospel which can be proclaimed? Nothing of the kind. It is only
proved that many Christians are not acting according to their belief,
that their practice does not square with their {17} profession. The
belief and the profession are not proved to be wrong and bad. It would
be unreasonable to argue that, because a man who has been vehemently
sounding the praises of truthfulness is convicted of deliberate lying,
therefore truthfulness is shown to be worthless. It is equally