"Do you know why?"
"No," said Broadhem.
"Because modern Christians don't really believe much more than sceptics—a man's life is the result of his internal, not his external belief. There can be no life separate from internal belief, and the lives of men are imperfect because their belief is external. The right thing believed the right way must inevitably produce the perfect life. Either, then, the civilised world believes the wrong thing, or it believes the right thing the wrong way. In other words, faith and charity are inseparable, and when one is perfect the other is too. That is what I mean by 'living the life.'"
"According to that, you would make out that nobody rightly believes the Christian religion who is not perfect; that, you know, is ridiculous," said Broadhem.
"That is, nevertheless, exactly what I do mean. To know the doctrine, it is necessary to do the will. Christians of the present day adopt certain theological dogmas intellectually and call them their religious belief. This has a superficial and varying influence upon their lives, for it consists merely of opinions which are liable to change. The only kind of faith which is inseparable from life is a divine conviction of truth imparted to the intellect through the heart, and which becomes as absolute to the internal conscience as one's existence, and as impossible of proof. It may be added to, but what has once been thus accepted can never be changed. Such a faith cannot be selfish, for it has been derived from the affections, hence the life must be charitable. But the modern Christian belief, received by an effort of pure reason directly through the intellect, is not a divine intuition, which, if embodied, would result in a perfect life and a united Church, but a theological problem which professors of religion, unlike professors of mathematics, are at liberty to solve for their own benefit, according to their own taste, and to quarrel about incessantly, thereby giving occasion to the thoughtless to scoff, and to the thoughtful to reject all revelation as 'foolishness'—since it is incapable of demonstration by the Baconian method,—the only one known to these 'wise and prudent' philosophers, but one by which, fortunately for them, 'babes' are not expected to prove their relationship before believing in their mothers."
"Then," said Broadhem, "you actually mean to say that the whole of Christendom is wanting in this faith?"
"I fear that almost universally they mistake a bare belief for faith. Their theology thus becomes an act of memory instead of a rule of life, and Christianity is reduced to a superstition. The only way of distinguishing superstition from true religion is by an examination of results. But where are the fruits of modern Christianity? If it be absolutely true, and all-sufficient for purposes of regeneration, how am I to account for the singular fact that there is as much wickedness in London in the year 1865 A.D., as there was in Jerusalem in the year 1 B.C.? If the object of the last revelation was to take the place of the one before it, and to reform the world, why are the best modern Christians of my acquaintance no holier than the best modern Jews whom I have the honour to know?"
"But the object of the last revelation was not to reform the world, but to save it," he replied.
"Thanks, Broadhem, for having put in rather too epigrammatic a form, perhaps, to please those who believe it, the most diabolical sophism that was ever invented to beguile a Church—the doctrine that men can be saved by opinion without practice: that a man's practice may be bad, and yet because his faith is good his salvation is sure—that he can, by such a miserable philosophy as would disgrace the justice of the earth, escape the just sentence to be passed upon all his deeds. The results of so fatal a dogma must be a Church that tends to atheism, and that loves corruption. There is in every heart a something that speaks against this, and speaks with a burning language that sweeps the invisible chords of the inmost consciousness, and awakens a torrent of indignant denial of the shallow sophistry that a man can be saved if his thoughts and life are bad. If he cherish self-love, and the love of ruling others, though he intrench the intellect in the midst of all creeds, and span the reason with all faiths, making a sacred public profession before all men, he but adds to the heinousness of his crime, and makes more terrible the fast-coming and final judgment."
Broadhem stopped suddenly in the street as I finished in a somewhat excited tone, and gasped rather than spoke, "Frank, you literally astound me. I could never have believed it possible you would have come out in that line. Are those your own ideas or another's?"