ness and windiness which inevitably follows
when the talkers get the upper hand of the doers, or when theology gets
the upper hand of religion, which is the same thing. The deeds that I
do, these bear witness of me. What other conceivable witness could
there be?

Not only has Christianity evolved an institutional selfishness which
shows plain signs of having been copied from the kingdoms that are of
this world--the strife among churches as to which shall be greatest
proves that--but the very form of its thought has become infected with
ideas from the same source. Even philosophers have a difficulty of
getting away from the notion that the universe is an immense political
state, which most assuredly it is not; while careless thinkers will
constantly refer to the laws of nature as though they were legal
enactments, to which they bear no resemblance. At no point has
Christianity become more deeply secularized. Instead of the Kingdom
which is _not_ of this world transfiguring the kingdoms that are,
lifting them up to its own level, where every term of law is translated
into a term of love, and the very notion of a Kingdom passes into that
of a Father's house of many mansions, the reverse process has taken
place. Love has forsaken its mission of converting law to its own
essence, and become a timid and apologetic fugitive, harried by the
police.

No wonder that men declare themselves perplexed by Christianity. No
wonder they find this mixture unacceptable. No wonder that official
Christianity, tied up as it is with a political system which manages
its own business none too well, is continually breaking down under the
assaults of a critical age, which has grown almost as tired of the one
thing as of the other.

I am far from saying that Christianity excludes the idea of God as the
moral Governor of the universe or forbids us so to think of him. But
it does not _begin_ with that idea, as we are apt to do. It allows us
to arrive at it, perhaps, at the end of a long pilgrimage in
experience; but if we never get there at all it makes no lamentation,
pulls no long face, and does not treat us as lost souls. It does not
say "Begin with the idea of a Cosmic Potentate and make everything else
fit in with that." It does not require us to dismiss from our minds as
blasphemous every thought of God which makes him other than the
omnipotent legislator of the universe. In the religion of Jesus I am
struck by the absence, by