.

      PART I.

       FROM A BROAD CHURCH POINT OF VIEW.

       Table of Contents

Chapter I.

       Pauline Christianity.

       Table of Contents

      NINETEEN centuries have rolled away since, according to our creed as Christians, the angels of heaven proclaimed to men of earth the Gospel—i.e., the Glad Tidings—of the advent of Jesus. More than eighteen hundred years have passed since the Jewish artisan whom we declare to have been God incarnate, leaving the carpenter’s workshop, tried to reform His fellow-countrymen by declaring to them that the final Day of Judgment was at hand. One millennium has slowly but for ever gone, and even a second millennium has nearly passed away, since the poor Communist of Galilee, whose followers had “all things in common,” solemnly affirmed, “ Ye cannot serve God and Private-property.” At least a hundred generations have one after the other suffered and passed on into the darkness since the followers of Paul-were at Antioch first called Christians. And over a millennium and a half divide us from the time when Constantine, the worshipper of the Sun-God Apollo, made the faith so zealously preached by Paul the State Religion of the almost world-wide Roman Empire.

      Thanks primarily to the action of Constantine, the Church we belong to had for at least a thousand years the nations of Christendom at its feet, and the almost almighty power of education in its hands. For several centuries, too, it had sole control of the literary records of the wisdom and history of the past, and could destroy or alter what it chose.

      It is, alas! greatly to be feared that our Church at times somewhat abused the power in question.

      One of the greatest sins against humanity in the direction indicated was undoubtedly the destruction of the priceless manuscripts which, when Constantine the Great died, were still stored in the famous library of Alexandria.

      Upon the strength of an accusation made by a Christian Bishop against the Saracen who conquered Alexandria A.C. 640, this crime has long been charged to the account of the broad-minded and tolerant Caliph Omar, whose behaviour when he captured Jerusalem puts that of the Crusaders to shame. But it is now more or less generally admitted that the invaluable records in question were destroyed at the request of the Christian Bishop of Alexandria some fifty years after the death of Constantine, and two hundred and fifty years before the army of Omar appeared upon the scene.

      Yet, notwithstanding such unscrupulous actions as the one referred to seems to have been, notwithstanding the great lapse of time since Paul started its career as a supposed world-conquering force, notwithstanding the unexampled chances and unequalled opportunities which it inherited as a result of succeeding in its youth to the position of State Religion of the world-wide Roman Empire, notwithstanding the fact that the races over which it has had control have been the most strenuous upon the face of the earth, notwithstanding the dying-out before its advancing armies and colonists of many a pagan race,— notwithstanding all these things the Christian Faith has come to a dead halt. For every genuine recruit it obtains otherwise than from the nurseries of its followers, two of its rank and file at heart waver in their allegiance.

      As a matter of fact, our faith as Christians, despite the noble efforts of individuals, is, as a whole, losing ground. Not only has Christianity, with all its advantages, failed, even in eighteen centuries, to secure even the nominal suffrages of one half—much less of the whole—of human kind, but the proportion which those who honestly believe in its distinguishing dogmas bear to the remainder of our race, is undoubtedly decreasing.

      As a son of the Church, and one convinced of its immense potentialities for good, the author has searched for, and, as he thinks, has found, those weak points in the Christianity of the last eighteen centuries which its history and the present state of affairs betoken.

      But the discussion of those weak points does not lie within the province of the present volume, and must be reserved for a future one.

      For before the weak points of any one’s religion, whatever religion it be, can be anything like accurately gauged, a painful process has to be gone through. So absolutely one-sided in their views are nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, and so prejudiced are they in favour of such belief as their education and environment have caused to be their second nature, so few even of the few really earnest ones seek Truth, whatever it may cost, rather than a confirmation of their own opinions, that a necessary preliminary to a just discussion and appreciation of the weak

Скачать книгу