that all other peoples had died in the
dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief
compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness
about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering
some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one
religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to
consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics
of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the
ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was
bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good
enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing
thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing
so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on
every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in
detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three
accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain
sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack
on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation
of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then,
other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of
Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed
women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them
loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or,
again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the Marriage Service, were
said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman's intellect. But
I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's
intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent
that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with
its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the
next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its
ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused
for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had
always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh
the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is o