They usually say that the moral teaching of Christianity is very
fine, but overexaggerated; that to make it quite right we must
reject all in it that is superfluous and unnecessary to our manner
of life. "And the doctrine that asks too much, and requires what
cannot he performed, is worse than that which requires of men what
is possible and consistent with their powers," these learned
interpreters of Christianity maintain, repeating what was long ago
asserted, and could not but be asserted, by those who crucified
the Teacher because they did not understand him--the Jews.

It seems that in the judgment of the learned men of our
time the Hebrew law--a tooth for a tooth, and an eye for
an eye--is a law of just retaliation, known to mankind five
thousand years before the law of holiness which Christ
taught in its place.

It seems that all that has been done by those men who understood
Christ's teaching literally and lived in accordance with such an
understanding of it, all that has been said and done by all true
Christians, by all the Christian saints, all that is now reforming
the world in the shape of socialism and communism--is simply
exaggeration, not worth talking about.

After eighteen hundred years of education in Christianity the
civilized world, as represented by its most advanced thinkers,
holds the conviction that the Christian religion is a religion of
dogmas; that its teaching in relation to life is unreasonable, and
is an exaggeration, subversive of the real lawful obligations of
morality consistent with the nature of man; and that very doctrine