The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and
yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian
crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always
forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the
thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second
because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this
monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity
grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one
real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian
religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place,
full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably
be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in
Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed
with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the
doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--I mean the doctrine that
there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the
omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men;
but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and
most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common
sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be
writing "Thou shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest
hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when
deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this
doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral
sense, and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages
and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason.
But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who