"Last Sunday in the pulpit I quoted the words of Colonel Ingersoll, 'God cannot afford to damn an honest man.' That phrase has always seemed to me a marvellous mixture of blasphemy, ignorance, and sound common sense. From my point of view it is blasphemous, because it is the utterance of the atom trying to understand the universe. It is ignorant, because it is impossible for that human atom who uttered it to form any adequate conception of the infinitely great whole of which he was an infinitely small part. And yet, humanly speaking, it is the soundest and hardest of common sense. If God is honest He must respect honesty, no matter whether it is the honesty of belief, or of disbelief, always supposing that the belief and the disbelief are honest.
"The man who calls himself a Christian and does not conduct his daily life in accordance with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, is one of two things—a fool who cannot understand the meaning of plain words, or a knave, who, for many reasons, which most of my hearers will understand, pretends to be that which he is not. I may remind you here that knavery is not by any means confined to the limits of what is conventionally termed criminality. For every crime that puts a man or a woman into prison, there are a hundred others committed in every-day life with absolute impunity, and yet they are just as serious, and they merit a similar if not a heavier punishment than those which the law punishes with social degradation and the miseries of penal servitude.
"I wonder whether it has occurred to any of you who are listening to me now—whether you are Christians, professed or real, atheists or agnostics—to ask yourselves if, under the present conditions of what we are pleased to call civilization, an honest world would be possible, and that, I may say, is just the same thing as asking whether Christians can or cannot live their lives in accordance with the teachings of Him who went about doing good? Of course we all call ourselves honest, and some of us really believe that we are. At any rate, most of us would feel very much insulted if any one else told us that we were not. But are we? Let us put our pride in our pockets for a moment and try to answer that pregnant question. Honesty, like many other terms, of which immorality is one, has, through its conventional use, acquired a very restricted and therefore a quite unreal meaning. We have, by some vicious process of thought, got accustomed to call a man or a woman who transgresses the social law in a certain direction immoral, and in the same way we have come to apply the word dishonesty to practices which mean stealing or the attempt to steal property of a concrete form.
"But I think you will all agree with me that both these words have come to be used in a sense which is so narrow, that it destroys their original meaning. For every man or woman who transgresses the social law and is therefore called immoral—of course after being found out—there are a hundred or more who break the moral law every hour of their waking lives. All of you, no doubt, possess bibles. Read the 27th and 28th verses of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, and you will understand what I mean.
"But there is another immorality than this, and, as I believe, a greater immorality, for this, so far as it concerns our sister women, is often not immorality at all. It is the surrender of a feeble nature to a pitiless necessity, the necessity to live, the only alternative, in too many cases, to self-murder. There is another immorality infinitely worse than this, which when, as we Christians believe, the hosts of men are ranged before the Bar of Eternal Justice will spell damnation, hopeless and irrevocable, and that is the immorality which means a dishonesty that deliberately deceives—not always for the purpose of gain, for this kind of dishonesty is generally practised by those whom, to put it plainly, it would not pay to steal.
"A French philosopher once said that there is that within the heart of every man which, if known, would make his dearest friend hate him. That, I am afraid, is true, not only of men but of women. It is not the fault of the men or the women; it is due simply to artificial conditions of life and to the individual ignorance and stupidity which make reform impossible. Until what we call civilised and Christian Society can make up its mind to conduct its personal, its national, and its international affairs on the broad and simple lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, no man can afford to be quite honest. In other words, if Christendom would be really Christian, it would also be honest; honest with itself and with its God, with the God whom it now only pretends to worship, saying loudly, 'Lord, Lord,' and doing not the things which He saith!
"It would not matter—and this I say with all reverence and with a full sense of my responsibilities as a Priest of the Church—it would not matter whether Society called itself Christian or not, as long as it was honest."
"That is absolute atheism and blasphemy!" exclaimed a well-known Nonconformist preacher, springing up and holding his hands out towards the platform. "The man who could speak those words cannot be either a Christian or a minister of the Gospel. I call upon the speaker to be honest now, honest with himself and us, and confess that he is not a Christian, and therefore unworthy to be a preacher of any Christian creed."
A storm of mingled expressions of approval and assent burst out from every part of the crowded hall. Vane stood immovable and listened to it with a smile hovering round his lips. The President rose at once and said:
"I must remind the reverend gentleman who has made this interruption—an interruption which, if made in a church or a chapel, would render him liable to imprisonment—is entirely out of order. We welcome discussion, but it must come in its proper place. We cannot tolerate interruption, and we won't."