ows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their
civilisation if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the
last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will
use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and
the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the
Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom
and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration;
I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as
an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin
against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a
mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were
guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a
passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death
that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence
now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other;
in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot
go to Hartlepool. I have known people who protested against religious
education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's
mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have
known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by
showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical
purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they
smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat
it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered
furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks
this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic
who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very
existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims
not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the
emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by
which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some
one who never lived at all.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only
succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do
not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common
sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to G