We must
search into all its evidence. We must try to understand how it commends
itself to all our minds. But first of all we want to know certainly what
Christianity is, if it is able to deal with the thing with which we are
puzzling or never to give an intelligent definition of it.
How is it now? I go to a certain man and ask him, "Why do you not
believe in Christianity?" and he says, "It is incredible. I cannot
believe in it." "What is it that you cannot believe in?" and then he
takes forsooth some little point of Christian doctrine, some speculation
of some Christian teacher, some dogma of some Christian church, and
says, "That is incredible," as if that were Christianity. Over and over
again men are telling that they do not believe in Christianity, when the
real thing that they do not believe in is something that is no essential
part of Christian faith whatsoever. They never have given to themselves
a real definition of what the Christ and the Christianity in which they
are called upon to believe, into which they are invited to enter, really
is. The lecturer goes up and down the land and in the face of mighty
audiences he denounces Christianity. He declares it to be unintelligible
and absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when you ask what it is that
he is thus denouncing, what it is that he is thus convicting over and
over again, you find that it is something not simply which makes no part
of Christianity, but which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of
Christianity itself.
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