can possibly be
alive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted
one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged.
"That," says Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a private
detective"; after he has caught he can set free. The Christian Church
can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting
that official detective—the State. This, indeed, is one of the
injustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise from
looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. We
are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews,
and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they
used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them.
Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did the
Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the
Chinese.

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and
employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture,
if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real
difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The
State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment,
more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal
everywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to
create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever
attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to
avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the
weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the
world. Its speciality—or, if you like, its oddity—was this
merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not
slay.

I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays
on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in
America. The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent
experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure
as he passes through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire to
make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people;
that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions
have been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tell
them how good they are already; and in the case of s