sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack
on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation
of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then,
other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of
Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed
women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them
loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or,
again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the Marriage Service, were
said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman's intellect. But
I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's
intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent
that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with
its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the
next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its
ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused
for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had
always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh
the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often
accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious
extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have
found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one
another," and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion
that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same
conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for
despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I
did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only
concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such
hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be