Christian, it would be impossible: it is our imaginary Christianity
that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in
our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing IT up, like
everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organ
and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival--the Christianity,
which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our
play about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chanting
hymns through traceried windows for background effect, and
artistically modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation of
mimicked prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for the
benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be the
signification of the Third Commandment;-) this gas-lighted, and gas-
inspired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem
of our robes from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to
do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English word
or deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one
National act or hope thereon,--we know too well what our faith comes
to for that! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke
than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ pipes, both:
leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the
property man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy
expiration, and look after Lazarus at the doorstep. For there is a
true Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is
the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.

All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you
nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you who do not; by
whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you
live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your