d: yea, let God be true, but every man a
liar.' Truth continues to be truth, though people who talk much about
it may be false. Goodness continues to be goodness, though people who
sing its praises may be thoroughly depraved. Generosity does not cease
to be generosity, though its beauty should be extolled by a miser.
Courage does not cease to be courage, though its heroism should be
extolled by a coward. Temperance {23} is temperance, though we should
be assured of the fact by the thick speech of a drunkard. The virtue
is admirable, even when those who acknowledge how admirable it is do
not practise it.

That Christianity towers so far above the attainments of its average
disciples, nay, above the attainments of its saintliest, is itself a
kind of evidence of its divine origin. 'When the King of the Tartars,
who was become Christian,' says Montaigne, 'designed to come to Lyons
to kiss the Pope's feet, and there to be an eyewitness of the sanctity
he hoped to find in our manners, immediately our good S. Louis sought
to divert him from his purpose: for fear lest our inordinate way of
living should, on the contrary, put him out of conceit with so holy a
belief. And yet it happened quite otherwise to this other, who going
to Rome to the same end, and there seeing the dissolution of the
Prelates and people of that time, settled {24} himself so much the more
firmly in our religion, considering how great the force and dignity of
it must necessarily be that could maintain its dignity and splendour
amongst so much corruption and in so vicious hands.' God's truth
abides whether men receive it or deny it. Christ is the Way, the
Truth, and the Life, though every so-called Christian should become
apostate. The woes of the world are to be cured by more Christianity,
not by less; and on us, in whose hands have been placed its holy
oracles, rests the responsibility of proving its inestimable advantage
ourselves and of conferring it on all mankind.

Wherever Christianity has really flourished, untold blessings have been
the result.[19] With all the sad deficiencies and sadder perversions
by which its course has been chequered, no influence for good can be
compared with it in elevating character, in diffusing peace and {25}
goodwill, in fitting men to labour and to endure. The diffusion of the
spirit of Christianity is a synonym for the diffusion of all that tends
to the true well-being of the world. Only as genuine Christi