The most popular impeachments of Christianity are mainly these.
It is a mass of false and superstitious beliefs long exploded. It is
the opponent of progress and inquiry, the discoveries of science having
been made in direct defiance of its teaching and its influence.
It is the champion of oppression and tyranny. It aims at keeping the
poor in ignorance and destitution. It prostrates itself before the
rich and seeks the patronage of the great.
It so insists on people being absorbed in {13} the thought of heaven
that it practically precludes them from doing any good on earth.
It is a system of selfishness, inculcating the dogma that no one need
care for anything except the salvation of his own soul.[11]
It is the foster-mother of all the evil and misery by which society is
distressed. Dishonesty, cruelty, slavery, war, persecution, avarice,
drunkenness, vice, would seem to be its natural fruits.
'How calm and sweet the victories of life,'
shrieked Shelley in one of his early poems.
'How terrorless the triumph of the grave ...
... but for thy aid
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,
Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men,
And heaven with slaves!
Thou taintest all thou look'st upon!'[12]
What shall we say to these accusations? Christians have been credulous
and superstitious, have argued and acted as if only in {14} the
abnormal and exceptional could the Divine Presence be found, as if God
were a hard Taskmaster and capricious Tyrant. They have resisted
progress and inquiry, blindly refusing to see the light which was
streaming upon them. They have unquestionably been guilty of miserable
pride towards inferiors in wealth or in station, and guilty of
miserable sycophancy towards the rich and the powerful. Christians
have too frequently neglected the material well-being of the community,
have suffered disgraceful outward conditions to remain without protest,
have not striven to shed abroad happiness and brightness in squalid and
wretched lives. Christians have been art and part in fostering such
conditions as wrung from compassionate and indignant hearts the _Song
of the Shirt_ and the _Cry of the Children_. Christians have imagined
that correctness of belief would make up for falseness of heart, and
loudness of profession for depravity of {15} practice. Christians have
supposed that in religion all that has to be striven for is the
salvation of one's own soul, have even represented the joy of the
redeemed as heightened by a contemplation of the torments of the lost.
Christians must bear the responsibility of much of the abounding vice
which they have not earnestly tried to combat where it already exists,
and which, in various forms, they have introduced into regions where it
was unknown before. Lawlessness and degradation in the slums, fraud
and dishonesty in trade, gross revelations in the fashionable world;
bigotry, slander, scandals in the ecclesiastical world; plots, wars,
treacheries, assassinations, in the political world: these things ought
not so to be. The fiercest denunciations, the most withering satires,
which unbelievers have employed, do not exceed in intensity of
condemnation the judgment which Christian preachers and Christian
writers have pronounced.[13]
{16}
In all ages of the Church the most powerful weapon against Christianity
has been the example of Christians. The Faith which they nominally
hold has been judged by the lives which they actually lead.[14]
'Christianity,' said a bishop of the eighteenth century, 'would perhaps
be the last religion a wise man would choose, if he were guided by the
lives of those who profess it.'[15] But is this to admit that the hope
of the world lies in renouncing Christianity? that in confining
ourselves to the seen and the temporal, we shall best elevate mankind?
that the prospect of annihilation and the absence of wisdom, love, and
Providence in the order of the universe constitute the most glorious
gospel which can be proclaimed? Nothing of the kind. It is only
proved that many Christians are not acting according to their belief,
that their practice does not square with their {17} profession. The
belief and the profession are not proved to be wrong and bad. It would
be unreasonable to argue that, because a man who has been vehemently
sounding the praises of truthfulness is convicted of deliberate lying,
therefore truthfulness is shown to be worthless. It is equally
unreasonable to identify Christianity with everything to which it is
most definitely opposed, to represent it as the enemy of everything
which it was intended to maintain, and then to conclude that
Christianity is discredited.[16] As we should argue from the detection
of a liar, not that lying is right, but that he should return to the
ways of truth, so we should argue from the lives of Christians who live
in flagrant contradiction to the precepts of our Lord and His Apostles,
not that the precepts should be rejected, but that they should be kept;
not that Christianity should be abolished, but that it should be obeyed.
{18}
Christians have created prejudice, hatred, against Christianity, but it
is not Christianity which they have been exhibiting. We repudiate the
hideous travesty which they have made, the hideous travesty which is
credulously or maliciously accepted by assailants as a correct
representation. Christianity is not a religion of darkness and
superstition: it calls to its disciples 'Be children of light: prove
all things: hold fast that which is good.' Christianity does not
sycophantishly court the rich and despise the poor: it tells the
stories of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and of the Rich Fool, and it
declares 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' Christianity does not teach
that the life which a man leads is of less consequence than the belief
which he professes: it demands, 'Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not
the things which I say?' Christianity is not selfish, is not a system
which inculcates the saving of one's own soul as the first and last of
duties: {19} 'He that loveth his life shall lose it. Bear ye one
another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. By this shall all
men know that ye are My disciples if ye have love one to another.' It
is surely reasonable to demand that Christianity shall be judged, not
by its misrepresentations, but by what it is in itself, not as it has
been perverted by bitter enemies, or by false disciples, but as it is
proclaimed and manifested in its Author and Finisher.