It is quite true that to be popular a religion must be corrupt. The fact is noted both by its critics and enemies and by its friends and devotees. They express their minds in different terms but they agree. There is, however, a difference running through their agreement, at least in many cases. The critics who are also enemies regard the corruption not strictly as corruption but as the clearer manifestation of the true character religion has from the beginning. The religious man means precisely what he says when he calls it corrupt. There is a reality, true, beautiful, good, which men in the multitude do not find attractive, but which may be adapted, one way or another, overlaid, delicately or barbarously perverted, to suit them.

Jesus Christ was not popular, nor were his principles. For a time, no doubt, people heard him gladly. He went about among them doing good, healing, compassionate. But when they realized how discordant with themselves his prophetic message really was they hounded him to death. 'Not this man but Barabbas,' they cried. Barabbas was far more popular than this prophet without honour in the country that should have known him best, and did know enough of him to be sure that he and his interests were alien from them and theirs.

It is this that stands in the gate of popularity over against an uncorrupted Christian religion, this separation from the people and their interests as they commonly are. The kingdom for which Jesus lived and died, the community of wisdom and love and self-giving, is not desired by the societies in which narrower self-interests reign. 'Change your minds,' the prophet must always say to his people, 'repent, change your minds about everything in the world, about yourselves, and about God.'

Can we wonder that bit by bit compromise creeps in? Anything so subversive must be accommodated here and there to things as they are, for things as they are have to remain—somehow. The popular conception of right government and right morals, the popular craving for magic and for royal roads and easy-going machines, for an assured salvation or an infallible guide, permeates insensibly the religion which a poetic religious genius has revealed. The divine voice is drowned in the shouting of men who will be heard and listened to. So, whether great Rome or the little Bethel be established in popularity, the Christian religion must have been corrupted in it to meet the desires and condone the sins and errors of the people who have so disastrously been won without being transformed.

Christianity became popular. Shall we, then, look for its truth in popular presentations of it? If science were popular, should we seek its truth that way? Or do we take popular philosophy, or the view of the world or of the British Constitution presented in newspapers, as our guide to the truth of these things? Yet it seems that when a man studies the Christian religion he does just what he would regard himself as a fool for doing in regard to any other serious matter. He takes it in its established and popular or once popular guise, and then says—'this, this, is what the Christian religion is.' And if another presentation is offered him, say that of the Gospels or the great mystics, prophets, saints, who have been nurtured in the true faith, and fed by the divine wisdom of Christ, he says it is not Christianity at all, because Christianity is and must be taken as the religion of Christians in the multitude, not as the private discoveries or inventions of certain gifted or peculiar men—those saints, prophets, mystics—or even as Jesus Christ himself, living, dying, living for ever, whom Nietzsche took to be the only Christian.

If a man is more careful, he seems to himself to have been as careful as he need be when he goes to the official presentation of religion by theologians and doctors, and in the organized procedure of religious government and institutions. That, he says, must show me what Christianity really is. That is Christian orthodoxy. And, undoubtedly, if he carries his investigations far he will find there much that is more valuable and more difficult to dispose of easily, than what he finds current in the multitude. Yet here he needs more caution than he usually shows, however careful he is to distinguish between the official orthodoxy and the unofficial representation of it. He needs to learn or to recall continually the manner of life and thought everywhere in regard to life's effects and tools and products. He needs to tell himself that just as in the monsters of bygone epochs on the earth life was overwhelmed in monstrosity, and in the armoured beasts it was checked by the very instruments that seemed its best protection, so in all human organizations (and every Church, whatever else it may be, is a human organization) there is an ever-present danger to the spirit and the life they have been designed, well or ill, to serve. 'Automatism dogs our steps; the formula crystallizes the living thought that gave it birth, the idea is oppressed by the word, the spirit overwhelmed by the letter.' And if to this ever-present danger to religion there is added, as there very frequently is, the insidious influence of the worldly-world, of ambition, political intrigue, the pressure of popular demands and of a narrow but immensely powerful self-interest, the religious institution, if it persists unchanged, easily—one may dare to say inevitably—ceases to bear faithful witness to the religious life.

Again, the procedure of theologians, and above all the procedure of 'theologizers,' is open and always has been open to serious question. They are aware that their work is one of science; but as it began in a time when science had not learnt its best methods, nor the necessity of ever relating itself anew to living experience, theirs is a science very far from being what we have come to know and trust as scientific. Moreover, although it does change and move and grow, far more than most of us or of its professors see or acknowledge, it has never formally adopted change and movement and growth as in principle and fact necessary for its well-being. The theologians who claim to represent the orthodoxy of by far the great majority of Christians, those of the Church, Eastern or Western, are in the main determined to make every effort to abide in the old paths, and with more or less ingenuity accord themselves with a past supposed unchanging. That the present changes, they too often deplore, that in and by their own work the past has been changed, they seem not to know. And their own reluctance to change both disguises the fact that despite themselves they have done so, and militates against the value for other people of their change. The man who looks to them as representing the Christian religion takes them at their own estimate as in the main unchanging, and judges what they give him as being 'that which was from the beginning.' Along the Christian ages Christian theologians have changed into their own likeness the 'faith once delivered to the saints' and they have but rarely been saints.

It is to the saints and the prophets that we must look for the Christian religion, rather than to its doctors. But more than to any of these it is to the Supreme Person, Christ himself, saint and prophet above and in all others.

We have already found our advantage in this for the discussions of these pages. We have caught glimpses of the depth and range of some of the principles embodied both in the teaching and in the life of Jesus. The Gospels have brought us riches, although we have only taken grains of gold from their mine here or there. The Christian whom we are using as our authority for the time being is one who has sat at the feet of Christ and has the mind of Christ. He is one, happily, among many of all ages. And if for us he has no name, no concrete existence, nevertheless, as he is he is a witness whose testimony we can put to proof. He brings his documents, and better, he appeals to the witness in ourselves as truthseekers. He makes an appeal to which some of us at least find response within us. There are moments when what he says appears to be self-evident, so firmly rooted in us is a belief in those living facts of freedom and dependence, holiness and sin, love and its rejection, of which he speaks; so little is there, if there is anything, in what we have learnt from science and philosophy, that disputes them.

As to his documents—they too both carry and call forth their witness. We have those Gospels from different men; they speak in different voices and each with its own predilection, even prejudice, and its own colouring of thought, of knowledge or ignorance, of desire. Yet which among these writers could invent his subject? Which has succeeded in seriously defacing it? Behind them all he stands, the prophet of Nazareth, Jesus—God and man, the Christian says—and draws men to himself.

No doubt the Christian has much more to tell us than we can ask him for just now, or admit to our discussion. He has a great deal to say in defence of his institutions and his theologians, which may well be said and listened to. But it remains true that for us who are now asking, not for justification of these though ample justification there may be, but for the deepest principles of the Christian religion, it is to the mind of Christ and to him who has that mind that we must turn. Jesus built up no institution, gave no laws, announced no established plans, erected no infallible authority. He gave principles, living and spiritual principles. 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.' So his great mystical interpreter hears him say. And men have indeed found response to his words in the opening out of their own life and spirit.

We seek the truth and reality of spirit and life, we who are seeking here. And in this search we find ourselves more and more at one with the Christian. The view that he and his fellows take of the Christian Church, that organization which is at least meant to foreshadow the kingdom Jesus preached, lies beyond the scope of this enquiry. All that needs to be said here is that we must not and do not foreclose an enquiry that shall include it. We stand now upon the very threshold of the kingdom; and, may be, we look with longing eyes.