It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of organized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not the teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so long filled the world with blood and tears.

I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them: "What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a human being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"

Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, church fabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn. Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to be Protestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?" In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!" "O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!"

I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never any Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolute power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. En masse extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.