"Still for the reason that it separates," continued Bernal, "separates not only hereafter but here. We have kings and serfs, saints and sinners, soldiers to kill one another—God is still a God of Battle. There is no Christian army that may not consistently invoke your God's aid to destroy any other Christian army— none whose spiritual guides do not pray to God for help in the work of killing other Christians. So long as you have separation hereafter, you will have these absurd divisions here. So long as you preach a Saviour who condemns to everlasting punishment for disbelief, so long you will have men pointing to high authority for all their schemes of revenge and oppression here.
"Not until you preach a God big enough to save all can you arouse men to the truth that all must be saved. Not until you have a God big enough to love all can you have a church big enough to hold all.
"An Indian in a western town must have mastered this truth. He had watched a fight between drunken men in which one shot the other. He said to me, 'When I see how bad some of my brothers are, I know how good the Great Spirit must be to love them all!'"
"Was—was he a member of any church?" inquired the amiable Presbyterian, with a facetious gleam in his eyes.
"I didn't ask him—of course we know he wasn't a Presbyterian."
Hereupon Father Riley and the wicked Unitarian both laughed joyously. Then the Congregationalist, gazing dreamily through the smoke of his cigarette, remarked, "You have omitted any reference to the great fact of Christianity—the sacrifice of the Son of Man."
"Very well, I will tell you about it," answered the young man quite earnestly, whereat the Unitarian fairly glowed with wicked anticipations.
"Let us face that so-called sacrifice honestly. Jesus died to save those who could accept his claim to godship —believing that he would go to sit at the right hand of God to judge the world. But look—an engineer out here the other day died a horrible death to save the lives of a scant fifty people—their mere physical lives—died out of that simple sense of oneness which makes us selfishly fear for the suffering of others—died without any hope of superior exaltation hereafter. Death of this sort is common. I would not belittle him you call the Saviour—as a man he is most beautiful and moving to me—but that shall not blind me to the fact that the sacrificial element in his death is surpassed daily by common, dull humans."
A veiled uneasiness was evident on the part of his listeners, but the speaker gave no heed.
"This spectacle of sacrifice, of devotion to others, is needed as an uplift," he went on earnestly, "but why dwell upon one remote—obscured by claims of a God-jugglery which belittle it if they be true—when all about you are countless plain, unpretentious men and women dying deaths and—what is still greater,— living lives of cool, relentless devotion out of sheer human love.