uld accept that, everything else
mattered little. They must live their lives with that intuition to
guide them: the Church seems to me to be but the human spoiling and
complicating of that great simple idea. I look round and see the other
religious systems of the world--Mahomedanism, Buddhism, and the rest.
In each I see a man of profound religious ideals, whose system has been
adopted, and then formalised and vitiated by his followers. I do not
see that there is anything to make me believe that the same process has
not taken place in Christianity. The elaborate system of dogma and
doctrine seems to me a perfectly natural human process of trying to
turn ideas, essentially poetical, into definite and scientific truths,
and half its errors to arise from feeling the necessity of reconciling
and harmonising ideas, which I have described as poetical, which were
never meant to be reconciled or harmonised. And then there is the
added difficulty that, owing to the system of the Church, the ideas of
the earliest Christian teachers, like St. Paul, have been accepted as
infallible too; and hence arises the dilemma of having to bring into
line a whole series of statements, made, as in St. Paul's case, by a
man of intense emotion, which are neither consistent with each other,
nor, in all cases, with the teaching of Christ. My idea of
Christianity is to get as close to Christ's own teaching as possible.
I do not concern myself with the historical accuracy of the Gospel
narratives, or even with the incidents there recorded. Those records
are the work of men of very imperfect education, and feeble
intellectual grasp, in the grip of the prejudices and beliefs of their
age. But their very imperfection makes me feel more strongly the
august personality of Christ, because the principles, which they
represent Him as maintaining, seem to me to be entirely beyond anything
that they could themselves have originated. It seems to me, if I
discern Christ rightly--speaking of Him now purely as a man--that if He
could return to the earth, and be confronted with the system of any of
the Churches that bear His name, He would declare it to be all a
horrible mistake. It seems to me that what He aimed at was a strictly
individualistic system, an attitude of sincerity, simplicity, and
loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have
detested above everything), and free, too, from all elaborate and
metaphysical dogma. Instead of