ire men had been found wanting) Heaven came to save mankind in the
awful shape of a man. This would explain why the mass of men always look
backwards; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards
is the little continent where Christ has His Church. I know it will be
said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an answer
when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really only mean,
"Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much to insist on my
own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the
ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four
odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the
facts I always found they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian
arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the
moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in combination
create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased.
First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and
unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that
Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and
that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people
still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people as
the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention
these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them
independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical,
but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking at books
and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.
There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair
parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an
extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision,
flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy
of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a
being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god. Christ
had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think,
elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the _a fortiori_.
His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in
the clouds. The diction used _about_ Christ has been, and perhaps
wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used