f improvements to the credit of the particular
religion or political theory they defend. Every good Liberal knows that
bad harvests are due to Tory government. Every good Tory knows that
his Party alone is to thank for the glorious certainties that Britannia
rules the waves, that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that
journeymen tailors earn fourpence an hour more than they were paid in
the thirteenth century.

Cobdenites ascribe every known or imagined improvement in commerce, and
the condition of the masses, to Free Trade. Things are better than
they were fifty years ago: Free Trade was adopted fifty years ago.
_Ergo_--there you are.

There is not a word about the development of railways and steamships,
about improved machinery, about telegraphs, the cheap post and
telephones; about education and better facilities of travel; about the
Factory Acts and Truck Acts; about cheap books and newspapers; and who
so base to whisper of Trade Unions, and Agitators, and County Councils?

So it is with the Christian religion. We are more moral, more civilised,
more humane, the Christians tell us, than any human beings ever were
before us. And we owe this to the Christian religion, and to no other
thing under Heaven.

But for Christianity we never should have had the House of Peers, the
_Times_ newspaper, the Underground Railway, the _Adventures of Captain
Kettle_, the Fabian Society, or Sir Thomas Lipton.

The ancient Greek Philosophers, the Buddhist missionaries, the Northern
invaders, the Roman laws and Roman roads, the inventions of printing,
of steam, and of railways, the learning of the Arabs, the discoveries
of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Herschel, Hunter, Laplace, Bacon,
Descartes, Spencer, Columbus, Karl Marx, Adam Smith; the reforms
and heroisms and artistic genius of Wilberforce, Howard, King Asoka,
Washington, Stephen Langton, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, Rabelais,
and Shakespeare; the wars and travels and commerce of eighteen hundred
years, the Dutch Republic, the French Revolution, and the Jameson Raid
have had nothing to do with the growth of civilisation in Europe and
America.

And so to-day: science, invention, education, politics, economic
conditions, literature and art, the ancient Greeks and Oriental Wisdom,
and the world's Press count for nothing in the moulding of the nations.
Everything worth having comes from the pulpit, the British and Foreign
Bible Society, and the _War Cry_.

It is n