said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very
people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was
right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I
was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles
and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly
pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had
always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was
their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one
people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that
it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were
the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the
dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief
compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness
about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering
some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one
religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to
consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics
of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the
ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was
bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good
enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing
thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing
so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on
every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in
detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three
accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain