?"

"It is not Christ's religion which teaches him to do it," said Erica,
"it is the perversion of that religion."

"Then in all conscience the perversion is vastly more powerful and
extended than what you deem the reality."

"Unfortunately yes," said Erica, sighing. "At present it is."

"At present!" retorted the professor; "why, you have had more than
eighteen hundred years to improve it."

"You yourself taught me to have patience with the slow processes of
nature," said Erica, smiling a little. "If you allow unthinkable ages
for the perfecting of a layer of rocks, do you wonder that in a few
hundred years a church is still far from perfect?"

"I expect perfection in no human being," said the professor, taking up
a Bible from the table and turning over the pages with the air of a man
who knew its contents well; "when I see Christians in some sort obeying
this, I will believe that their system is the true system; but not
before." He guided his finger slowly beneath the following lines: "'Let
all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil-speaking be
put away from you, with all malice.' There is the precept, you see, and
a very good precept, to be found in the secularist creed as well; but
now let us look at the practice. See how we secularists are treated!
Why, we live as it were in a foreign land, compelled to keep the law yet
denied the protection of the law! 'Outlaws of the constitution, outlaws
of the human race,' as Burke was kind enough to call us. No! When I see
Christians no longer slandering our leaders, no longer coining hateful
lies about us out of their own evil imaginations, when I see equal
justice shown to all men of whatever creed, then, the all-conquering
love. Christianity has yet to prove itself the religion of love; at
present it is the religion of exclusion."

Mrs. MacNaughton, who was exceedingly fond of Erica, looked sorry for
her.

"You see, Erica," she said, "the professor judges by averages. No one
would deny that some of the greatest men in the world have been, and are
even in the present day, Christians; they have been brought up in it,
and can't free themselves from its trammels. You have a few people like
the Osmonds, a few really liberal men; but you have only to see how
they are treated by their confreres to realize the illiberality of the
religion as a whole."

"I think with you," said Erica, "that if the revelation of God's
love, and His purpose for all, be only