independence,
knows that there is something higher than charity--that is to say,
justice. He finds that many years before he was born his country
was divided out between certain successful robbers, flatterers,
cringers and crawlers, and that in consequence of such division
not only he himself, but a large majority of his fellow-men are
tenants, renters, occupying the surface of the earth only at the
pleasure of others. He finds, too, that these people who have done
nothing and who do nothing, have everything, and that those who do
everything have but little. He finds that idleness has the money
and that the toilers are compelled to bow to the idlers. He finds
also that the young men of genius are bribed by social distinctions
--unconsciously it may be--but still bribed in a thousand ways.
He finds that the church is a kind of waste-basket into which are
thrown the younger sons of titled idleness.

_Question_. Do you consider that society in general has been made
better by religious influences?

_Answer_. Society is corrupted because the laurels, the titles,
are in the keeping and within the gift of the corrupters. Christianity
is not an enemy of this system--it is in harmony with it. Christianity
reveals to us a universe presided over by an infinite autocrat--a
universe without republicanism, without democracy--a universe where
all power comes from one and the same source, and where everyone
using authority is accountable, not to the people, but to this
supposed source of authority. Kings reign by divine right. Priests
are ordained in a divinely appointed way--they do not get their
office from man. Man is their servant, not their master.

In the story of Robert Elsmere all there is of Christianity is left
except the miraculous. Theism remains, and the idea of a protecting
Providence is left, together with a belief in the immeasurable
superiority of Jesus Christ. That is to say, the miracles are
discarded for lack of evidence, and only for lack of evidence; not
on the ground that they are impossible, not on the ground that they
impeach and deny the integrity of cause and effect, not on the
ground that they contradict the self-evident proposition that an
effect must have an efficient cause, but like the Scotch verdict,
"not proven." It is an effort to save and keep in repair the
dungeons of the Inquisition for the sake of the beauty of the vines
that have overrun them. Many people imagine that falsehood