unreasonable to identify Christianity with everything to which it is
most definitely opposed, to represent it as the enemy of everything
which it was intended to maintain, and then to conclude that
Christianity is discredited.[16] As we should argue from the detection
of a liar, not that lying is right, but that he should return to the
ways of truth, so we should argue from the lives of Christians who live
in flagrant contradiction to the precepts of our Lord and His Apostles,
not that the precepts should be rejected, but that they should be kept;
not that Christianity should be abolished, but that it should be obeyed.

{18}

Christians have created prejudice, hatred, against Christianity, but it
is not Christianity which they have been exhibiting. We repudiate the
hideous travesty which they have made, the hideous travesty which is
credulously or maliciously accepted by assailants as a correct
representation. Christianity is not a religion of darkness and
superstition: it calls to its disciples 'Be children of light: prove
all things: hold fast that which is good.' Christianity does not
sycophantishly court the rich and despise the poor: it tells the
stories of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and of the Rich Fool, and it
declares 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' Christianity does not teach
that the life which a man leads is of less consequence than the belief
which he professes: it demands, 'Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not
the things which I say?' Christianity is not selfish, is not a system
which inculcates the saving of one's own soul as the first and last of
duties: {19} 'He that loveth his life shall lose it. Bear ye one
another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. By this shall all
men know that ye are My disciples if ye have love one to another.' It
is surely reasonable to demand that Christianity shall be judged, not
by its misrepresentations, but by what it is in itself, not as it has
been perverted by bitter enemies, or by false disciples, but as it is
proclaimed and manifested in its Author and Finisher.

IV

In the face of such tremendous indictments, what is the duty incumbent
on us who profess and call ourselves Christians? Certainly not that we
should abjure the name, but that we should remember what the name
signifies. We ought to consider our ways, to give ourselves to
self-examination. There must be something amiss when such hideous
portraits can be painted with any expecta