“Never mind,” said the professor, cheerfully, “it is to bigotry like this that we shall owe our recovery of Erica. And seriously, what can you think of a religion which can make a man behave like this to one who had never injured him, who, on the contrary, had befriended his child?”
“It is not Christ's religion which teaches him to do it,” said Erica, “it is the perversion of that religion.”
“Then in all conscience the perversion is vastly more powerful and extended than what you deem the reality.”
“Unfortunately yes,” said Erica, sighing. “At present it is.”
“At present!” retorted the professor; “why, you have had more than eighteen hundred years to improve it.”
“You yourself taught me to have patience with the slow processes of nature,” said Erica, smiling a little. “If you allow unthinkable ages for the perfecting of a layer of rocks, do you wonder that in a few hundred years a church is still far from perfect?”
“I expect perfection in no human being,” said the professor, taking up a Bible from the table and turning over the pages with the air of a man who knew its contents well; “when I see Christians in some sort obeying this, I will believe that their system is the true system; but not before.” He guided his finger slowly beneath the following lines: “'Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil-speaking be put away from you, with all malice.' There is the precept, you see, and a very good precept, to be found in the secularist creed as well; but now let us look at the practice. See how we secularists are treated! Why, we live as it were in a foreign land, compelled to keep the law yet denied the protection of the law! 'Outlaws of the constitution, outlaws of the human race,' as Burke was kind enough to call us. No! When I see Christians no longer slandering our leaders, no longer coining hateful lies about us out of their own evil imaginations, when I see equal justice shown to all men of whatever creed, then, the all-conquering love. Christianity has yet to prove itself the religion of love; at present it is the religion of exclusion.”
Mrs. MacNaughton, who was exceedingly fond of Erica, looked sorry for her.
“You see, Erica,” she said, “the professor judges by averages. No one would deny that some of the greatest men in the world have been, and are even in the present day, Christians; they have been brought up in it, and can't free themselves from its trammels. You have a few people like the Osmonds, a few really liberal men; but you have only to see how they are treated by their confreres to realize the illiberality of the religion as a whole.”
“I think with you,” said Erica, “that if the revelation of God's love, and His purpose for all, be only to be learned from the lives of Christians, it is a bad lookout for us. But God HAS given us one perfect revelation of Himself, and the Perfect Son can make us see plainly even when the imperfect sons are holding up to us a distorted likeness of the Father.”