1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER

Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be an
exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little while ago
and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found in existence,
and already in a state of diffusion. People have begun to hear of the
new belief first here and then there. It is interesting, for example,
to trace how Christianity drifted into the consciousness of the Roman
world. But when a religion has been interrogated it has always had
hitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story of a founder. The
renascent religion that is now taking shape, it seems, had no founder;
it points to no origins. It is the Truth, its believers declare; it has
always been here; it has always been visible to those who had eyes to
see. It is perhaps plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.

It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of those
who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of Christianity.
Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it as Christianity
without Theology. They do not know the creed they are carrying. It has,
as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle theology, flatly opposed
to any belief that could, except by great stretching of charity and
the imagination, be called Christianity. One might find, perhaps, a
parallelism with the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far
more probably an accidental rather than a sympathetic coincidence. Of
that the reader shall presently have an opportunity of judging.

This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only the
opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an extreme
neglect of definition. It was not at first anything more than a sect
of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst the uproar
and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more enthusiastic
Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in affected horror at
the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal mystery of the Trinity
was established as the essential fact of Christianity. Throughout those
three centuries, the centuries of its greatest achievements and noblest
martyrdoms, Christianity had not defined its God. And even to-day it has
to be noted that a large majority of those who possess and repeat
the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from
unthinking childhood, that only in the slightest