POINTS OE VIEW 157 



verse. The man is not changed when he hecomes a 

 poet ; his feelings and capacities are heightened. He 

 is not changed when he becomes a philosopher ; his 

 mind is deepened and enlarged. But to become a 

 Christian, as our fathers understood it, he is to be 

 radically broken up and turned about as St. Paul 

 was. His point of view is shifted to another sphere. 

 His interest is entirely transferred to another state 

 of existence. To the Christian this is a lost and 

 ruined world, the races of men are all on the road 

 to perdition, the heathen nations have fed the fires 

 of hell in all ages, this life is but ashes and dung. 

 For the intellect or the natural man to sympathize 

 with this view would be to negative and discredit 

 its own powers and aims. 



One of the first difiiculties the man of science has 

 with Christianity is that it is not commensurate with 

 the race or with history. What are you going to do, 

 he asks, with the splendid peoples that lived before 

 the time of Christ ? As a phase of man's religious 

 growth and culture he can understand it, but as a sys- 

 tem that excludes from all possibilities of salvation 

 the greater part of the human race, he is bound to re- 

 pudiate it. Christianity affords the highest religious 

 type. This is reasonable ; that it inaugurated the 

 only possible salvation, this is not reasonable. Our 

 fathers got along without steam and electricity, and 

 found life tolerable. Greece flourished before Christ 

 and achieved splendid results. Christianity is a great 

 advance, but it is no more the beginning of man's 

 spiritual life than Buddhism or any other pagan 



