Yet Christ, who came direct from God-who was God-to teach all men God's will, directed us to pray to God for our daily bread, for forgiveness of our trespasses against Him, and that He would not lead us into temptation! Imagine a father leading his children into temptation!

What is there so superior or so meritorious in the attitude of a religious man towards God? This good man prays: for what? He prays that something be given to him, or forgiven to him. He prays for gain or fear. Is that so lofty and so noble?

He

But you will say: "It is not all for gain or for fear. prays for love: because he loves God." But is not this like sending flowers and jewels to the king? The king is so rich already but there are many poor outside his gates. God is not in need of our love: some of God's children are in need. Truly, these high ideals are very curious.

Mr. Augustine Birrell, in his Miscellanies, quotes a passage from "Lux Mundi "; and although I cannot find it in that book, it is too good to lose:

If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation of what seems at first sight to the philosopher to be the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of philosophical apology, and then, when this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation of faith, probably after a passionate struggle to retain the old position, suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes up the new formula, just as if nothing had happened. It discovers that the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and is, in fact, what it always meant, only it has unfortunately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again; and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs, the clergy.

That passage has a rather sinister bearing upon the Christian's claim for spiritual genius.

But, indeed, the claim is not admissible. The Churches have taught many errors. Those errors have been confuted by scepticism and science. It is no thanks to spiritual discernment that we stand where we do. It is to reason we owe our advance; and what a great advance it is. We have got rid of Hell, we have got rid of the Devil, we have got rid of the Christian championship of slavery, of witchmurder, of martyrdom, persecution, and torture; we have

destroyed the claims for the infallibility of the Scriptures, and have taken the fetters of the Church from the limbs of Science and Thought, and before long we shall have demolished the belief in miracles. The Christian religion has defended all these dogmas, and has done inhuman murder in defence of them; and has been wrong in every instance, and has been finally defeated in every instance. Steadily and continually the Church has been driven from its positions. It is still retreating, and we are not to be persuaded to abandon our attack by the cool assurance that we are mentally unfit to judge in spiritual matters. Spiritual Discernment has been beaten by reason in the past, and will be beaten by reason in the future. It is facts and logic we want, not rhetoric.

CHRISTIANITY, we are told, vastly improved the relations of rich and poor.

How comes it, then, that the treatment of the poor by the rich is better amongst Jews than amongst Christians? How did it fare with the poor all over Europe in the centuries when Christianity was at the zenith of its power? How is it we have twelve millions of Christians on the verge of starvation in England to-day, with a Church rolling in wealth and an aristocracy decadent from luxury and selfindulgence? How is it that the gulf betwixt rich and poor in such Christian capitals as New York, London, and Paris is so wide and deep?

Christianity, we are told, first gave to mankind the gospel of peace. Christianity did not bring peace, but a sword. The Crusades were holy wars. The wars in the Netherlands were holy wars. The Spanish Armada was a holy expedition. Some of these holy wars lasted for centuries and cost millions of human lives. Most of them were remarkable for the barbarities and cruelties of the Christian priests and soldiers.

From the beginning of its power Christianity has been warlike, violent, and ruthless. To-day Europe is an armed camp, and it is not long since the Christian Kaiser ordered his troops to give no quarter to the Chinese.

There has never been a Christian nation as peaceful as the Indians and Burmese under Buddhism. It was King Asoka, and not Jesus Christ or St. Paul, who first taught and first established a reign of national and international peace.

To-day the peace of the world is menaced, not by the

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Buddhists, the Parsees, the Hindoos or the Confucians, but by Christian hunger for territory, Christian lust of conquest, Christian avarice for the opening up of "new markets," Christian thirst for military glory, and jealousy and envy amongst the Christian powers one of another.

Christianity, we are told, originated the Christlike type of character. The answer stares us in the face. How can we account for King Asoka, how can we account for Buddha? Christianity, we are told, originated hospitals.

Hospitals were founded two centuries before Christ by King Asoka in India.

Christianity, we are told, first broke down the barrier between Jew and Gentile!

How have Christians treated Jews for fifteen centuries? How are Christians treating Jews to-day in Holy Russia? How long is it since Jews were granted full rights of citizenship in Christian England?

All this, the Christian will say, applies to the false and not to the true Christianity.

Let us look, then, for an instant at the truest and best form of Christianity, and ask what it is doing? It is preaching about Sin, Sin, Sin. It is praying to God to do for Man what Man ought to do for himself, what Man can do for himself, what Man must do for himself; for God has never done it, and will never do it for him.

And this fault in the Christian-the highest and truest Christian-attitude towards life does not lie in the Christians: it lies in the truest and best form of their religion.

It is the belief in Free Will, in Sin, and in a Heavenly Father, and a Future recompense that leads the Christian wrong, and causes him to mistake the shadow for the substance.

"IF you take from us our religion," say the Christians, "what have you to offer but counsels of despair?" This seems to me rather a commercial way of putting the case, and not a very moral one. Because a moral man would not say: "If I give up my religion, what will you pay me?" He would say: "I will never give up my religion unless I am convinced it is not true." To a moral man the truth would matter, but the cost would not. To ask what one may gain is to show an absence of all real religious feeling.

The feeling of a truly religious man is the feeling that, cost what it may, he must do right. A religiously minded man could not profess a religion which he did not believe to be true. To him the vital question would be, not "What will you give me to desert my colours ?" but "What is the truth?"

But, besides being immoral, the demand is unreasonable. If I say that a religion is untrue, the believer has a perfect right to ask me for proofs of my assertion; but he has no right to ask me for a new promise. Suppose I say this thing is not true, and to believe anything which is untrue is useless. Then, the believer may justly demand my reasons. But he has no right to ask me for a new dream in place of the old one. I am not a prophet, with promises of crowns and glories in my gift.

But yet I will answer this queer question as fully as I can. I do not say there is no God. I do not say there is no "Heaven," nor that the soul is not immortal. There is not enough evidence to justify me in making such assertions.

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