isfactory to an honest man.

How has it come to pass that respectable Christian apologists have
fallen into such flagrant dishonesties?

The cause, I believe, lies in the habit mentioned in the first section
of this book--the habit, namely, of applying carnal logic (admirable
for carnal purposes) to divine things, not judging spiritual things by
spiritual. Anyone who studies this class of apologetics will be struck
by their resemblance to a well-known type of political speech, when the
spokesman of some discredited Government which has broken all the
promises given at the election, attempts to befool his constituents
into believing that the promises have been kept. It is all a matter of
artfully adjusting the emphasis--the art, as somebody has said "of
keeping the public quiet about one thing by making them noisy about
another." There is, I say, a significant resemblance between this
method and that of the Christian apologist when, for example, he exalts
the benevolence promoted by Christianity and ignores the parallel fact
that no other religion has developed such ferocious internal
differences nor been so cruel in its persecution of unbelievers. There
have been moments in the history of Christianity--or of what was called
so--when the slaughter of a million men, or the wiping out of an entire
civilization, meant no more to the leaders of the Church than it did,
by his own confession, to Napoleon. Witness the treatment meted out by
Cortes, in the name of Christ and of his Holy Mother, to the Aztecs of
Mexico. But the searchlight is seldom switched on to these things, and
even when it is "slow and gradual" will cover them.

This application of carnal logic to things divine, this judging the
success of Christianity by the standard of success which passes muster
in the crime-stained record of human society--as though it were the
business of religion to keep pace with the dawdling, creeping, cowardly
movement of mankind to better things, and not to hasten it with urgent
calls to repent of its hesitancy--this is only one form, though perhaps
the crowning form, in which the Kingdom that is not of this world has
been surrendered by its deluded guardians to the kingdoms which are.
In that surrender, so long an established fact that we have lost sight
of its malign implications, so deeply engrained into our mental habits
that we have almost forgotten that it exists, lies the true cause of
the failure of Christianity, an