THE GREATEST ILLUSION 55 



and envenomed quarrel which the civil power had to settle 

 for them. Ireland to-day is divided into political parties 

 which are really Protestant and Roman Catholic ; and the 

 malignant hatred of each for each maintains the old wounds 

 of Ireland as open sores. Wales has been engaged in an 

 ecclesiastical process which shows once more how theologians 

 can hate each other in the name of Christ. And in England 

 where will you find more sustained and ineffable contempt 

 than the High Church feels for the Low Church (and vice 

 versa), and each for the Dissenting bodies, and all of them 

 for the Heretic, the Infidel, the Agnostic, the Atheist, and 

 others beyond the pale? Were it not for the practical 

 indifference of the mass of people towards official Christianity 

 of all sorts, these internal dissensions would be more vividly 

 realized. They exist in every town and every village, setting 

 house against house, confusing civic effort, and blocking the 

 progress of education ; they exist in every household, setting 

 husband against wife, parents against children, brother 

 against sister, friend against friend. It is impossible to claim 

 that the men and the organizations responsible for these 

 barriers of hatred and distrust are inspired by a teacher who 

 brought nothing but the perfection of love and moral beauty 

 into the world. The barriers decay only when faith in 

 Christian doctrine begins to yield to doubt and to the know- 

 ledge which doubt brings ; they disappear only when thought 

 throws off the last shackle of the Christian illusion. Twentieth- 

 century Christianity proves, as the Christianity of all the 

 years of Our Lord proves, that a faith founded on a super- 

 human basis or on the teaching of any individual, however 

 divine in appearance, is the father of intolerance, whose one 

 virtue is consistency, and whose vices innumerable are written 

 in blood and flame on the pages of history and live on to-day, 

 impotent to kill, but still able to embitter the heart and cloud 

 the mind. Let those who claim that Christianity ushered in 

 the Golden Age examine that long record the massacres, 

 the religious wars, the organized persecution, the perpetual 

 wrangling over dogmas now discarded as base and immoral 

 superstitions, the suppression of learning, and all the other 

 fruits of the many orthodox Christianities and ask himself 

 what there is to set against it, and how much of the atoning 

 sweetness and light in the progress of humanity is due to the 

 men who were martyred in the name of faith. 



