Who does not know the maiden aunt, the widowed mother,
the mellowed elderly man, who live upon the hilltops of
unselfishness, shedding kindly thoughts and deeds around them,
but with their simple faith deeply, rooted in anything or
everything which has come to them in a hereditary fashion with
the sanction of some particular authority? I had an aunt who was
such an one, and can see her now, worn with austerity and
charity, a small, humble figure, creeping to church at all hours
from a house which was to her but a waiting-room between
services, while she looked at me with sad, wondering, grey eyes.
Such people have often reached by instinct, and in spite of
dogma, heights, to which no system of philosophy can ever
raise us.
But making full allowance for the high products of every
creed, which may be only, a proof of the innate goodness of
civilised humanity, it is still beyond all doubt that
Christianity has broken down, and that this breakdown has been
brought home to everyone by the terrible catastrophe which has
befallen the world. Can the most optimistic apologist contend
that this is a satisfactory, outcome from a religion which has
had the unopposed run of Europe for so many centuries? Which has
come out of it worst, the Lutheran Prussian, the Catholic
Bavarian, or the peoples who have been nurtured by the Greek
Church? If we, of the West, have done better, is it not rather
an older and higher civilisation and freer political institutions
that have held us back from all the cruelties, excesses and
immoralities which have taken the world back to the dark ages?
It will not do to say that they have occurred in spite of
Christianity, and that Christianity is, therefore, not to blame.
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