ften
accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious
extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have
found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one
another," and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion
that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same
conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for
despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I
did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only
concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such
hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be
very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also
spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic;
but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really
existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare,
austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy
of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly
optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something
quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no
explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically
speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of
mortals. _They_ gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was,
indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An
historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of
a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation
which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come
from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ,
He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still
thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.
Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were
puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short;
some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought
him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already
admitted) would be that he might be an odd sha