even in the unchangeable
Catholic Church, and will change with every advance of the positive
sciences and with every ascent of philosophy towards reality; but the
message stands, plain to the understanding of a child, yet still
rejected by the world. Christianity, as Dr. Jacks says, has been more
studied than practised.

How far quarrelling theologians and uncharitable Churches are
responsible for that rejection, let the conscience of the traditionalist
(if he happen to know history) decide.

As for the message, here is a reading of it by a Unitarian--a reading, I
venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times--a reading
which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its
profundity, is a message for the simple as well as for the learned.

Christianity is man's passport from illusion into reality. It reveals to
him that he is not in the world to set the world right, but to see it
right. He is not a criminal and earth is not a Borstal Institution.
Nature is the handiwork of a Father. Look deeply into that handiwork and
it reveals a threefold tendency--the tendency towards goodness, the
tendency towards beauty, the tendency towards truth. Ally yourself with
these tendencies, make yourself a growing and developing intelligence,
and you inhabit spiritual reality.

Study the manner of Jesus, His attitude to the simplest and most
domestic matters, the love He manifested, and the objects for which He
manifested that love. These things have "a deeper significance than our
pensive theologies have dared to find in them. . . . They belong not to the
fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.

His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an
almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging,
the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all
the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it.
It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more
abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution.

There are points on its path where it enters the shadows and even
descends into hell, for it is a religion of redemption, the religion of
the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, but "the end of it all is a
resurrection and not a burial, a festival and not a funeral, an ascent
into the heights and not a lingering in the depths."

Nowhere else is the genius of the Christian R