strous
dispute, in which a difference of belief, not as to the obligation to
perform the ceremony, but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real
ingestion of divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred,
and everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.

But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened on the new
faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic birth of Christ, simple
enough at first as a popular miracle, was not left so simple by the
theologians. They began to ask of what substance Christ was made in the
womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was added to the faith the question
arose, was the virgin the mother of God or only the mother of Jesus?
Arian schisms and Nestorian schisms arose on these questions; and the
leaders of the resultant agitations rancorously deposed one another
and excommunicated one another according to their luck in enlisting the
emperors on their side. In the IV century they began to burn one
another for differences of opinion in such matters. In the VIII century
Charlemagne made Christianity compulsory by killing those who refused
to embrace it; and though this made an end of the voluntary character of
conversion, Charlemagne may claim to be the first Christian who put men
to death for any point of doctrine that really mattered. From his time
onward the history of Christian controversy reeks with blood and
fire, torture and warfare. The Crusades, the persecutions in Albi and
elsewhere, the Inquisition, the "wars of religion" which followed the
Reformation, all presented themselves as Christian phenomena; but who
can doubt that they would have been repudiated with horror by Jesus?
Our own notion that the massacre of St. Bartholomew's was an outrage
on Christianity, whilst the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, and even of
Frederick the Great, were a defence of it, is as absurd as the opposite
notion that Frederick was Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola
men after the very heart of Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had
anything to do with him. It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John
Wesley died equally persuaded that he in whose name they had made
themselves famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms.
Poor Fox the Quaker would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox
made rather a miserable business of life.

Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of Jesus derived
their moral force from his credit, and so had to