ls. I simply deduced that
Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made
out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a
rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and
too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my
thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not
allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against
Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish,
and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its
attitude towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the
nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way,
Huxley in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem
tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian
counsels. The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that
priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read
it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have
gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the
next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I
found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but
for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars.
Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly
angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told
to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and
horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth
and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with
the meekness and non-resistance of the monastries were the very people
who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It
was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that
Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Lion did.
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and
yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian
crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always
forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the
thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight,