e promise not of a heaven and a hell, but of a heaven
for all--which is what the world is more and more emphatically
demanding--which it will eventually produce even here--for we have as
little sensed the possibilities of man's life here as we have divined
the attributes of God himself.

"Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the
fearless--the souls God must love most truly were it possible to
conceive him setting a difference among his creatures. Now you drive
away even the merely intelligent rabble. The average man knows your
defect--knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by
that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows,
indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who
is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures
upon his puppets.

"This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save
as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant. And you are losing
this prestige. Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and
find you wanting--is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping
forth to save himself as best he can.

"But, if you would again draw man, heat him, weld him, hold him--preach
Man to him, show him his own goodness instead of loading him with that
vicious untruth of his conception in iniquity. Preach to him the
limitless devotion of his common dull brothers to one another through
their sense of oneness. Show him the common beautiful, wonderful,
selfish self-giving of humanity, not for an hour or for a day, but for
long hard life-times. Preach the exquisite adjustment of that human
nature which must always seek its own happiness, yet is slowly finding
that that happiness depends on the happiness of all. The lives of daily
crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you--you all
know them. And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human
nature--of the man in the street--no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will
ever again move you as these do. And when you have preached this long
enough, then will take place in human society, naturally, spontaneously,
that great thing which big men have dreamed of doing with their
artificial devices of socialism and anarchism. For when you have
demonstrated the race's eternal oneness man will be as little tempted to
oppress, starve, enslave, murder or separate his brothers as he is now
tempted to mutila