ountry as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public
streets.[17] "Christian" did I say? Alas, if we were but wholesomely
_un_-Christian, it would be impossible; it is our imaginary
Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and
luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing it up,
like everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the
organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival--the Christianity
which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play
about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chanting hymns
through traceried windows for back-ground effect, and artistically
modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation of mimicked prayer
(while we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit of uncultivated
swearers, upon what we suppose to be the signification of the Third
Commandment);--this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are
triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the touch of the
heretics who dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian
righteousness in a plain English word or deed; to make Christian law
any rule of life, and found one National act or hope thereon,--we know
too well what our faith comes to for that! You might sooner get
lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your
modern English religion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the
organ-pipes, both; leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted
glass, to the property-man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in
one healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus at the door-step. For
there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and
that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.

38. All these pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you
nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you who do not; by
whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you live,
and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would
all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The
policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all night to watch
the guilt you have created there, and may have his brains beaten out,
and be maimed for life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor
wrestling with the sea's rage; the quiet student poring over his book
or his vial; the common worker,