tian lust of conquest, Christian avarice for the opening
up of "new markets," Christian thirst for military glory, and jealousy,
and envy amongst the Christian powers one of another.

Christianity, we are told, originated the Christ-like type of character.
The answer stares us in the face. How can we account for King Asoka, how
can we account for Buddha?

Christianity, we are told, originated hospitals.

Hospitals were founded two centuries before Christ by King Asoka in
India.

Christianity, we are told, first broke down the barrier between Jew and
Gentile.

How have Christians treated Jews for fifteen centuries? How are
Christians treating Jews to-day in Holy Russia? How long is it since
Jews were granted full rights of citizenship in Christian England?

All this, the Christian will say, applies to the false and not to the
true Christianity.

Let us look, then, for an instant, at the truest and best form of
Christianity, and ask what it is doing. It is preaching about Sin,
Sin, Sin. It is praying to God to do for Man what Man ought to do for
himself, what Man can do for himself, what Man must do for himself; for
God has never done it, and will never do it for him.

And this fault in the Christian--the highest and truest
Christian--attitude towards life does not lie in the Christians: it lies
in the truest and best form of their religion.

It is the belief in Free Will, in Sin, and in a Heavenly Father, and
a future recompense that leads the Christian wrong, and causes him to
mistake the shadow for the substance.

COUNSELS OF DESPAIR

"If you take from us our religion," say the Christians, "what have you
to offer but counsels of despair?" This seems to me rather a commercial
way of putting the case, and not a very moral one. Because a moral man
would not say: "If I give up my religion, what will you pay me?" He
would say: "I will never give, up my religion unless I am convinced
it is not _true_." To a moral man the truth would matter, but the cost
would not. To ask what one may _gain_ is to show an absence of all real
religious feeling.

The feeling of a truly religious man is the feeling that, cost what it
may, he must do _right_. A religiously-minded man _could_ not profess a
religion which he did not believe to be true. To him the vital question
would be, not "What will you give me to desert my colours?" but "What is
the _truth_?"

But, besides being immoral, the demand is unreasonable. If I