There was ignorance in the world before Christianity; has Jesus destroyed ignorance?
There were disease, crime, persecution, oppression, slavery, massacres, and bloodshed in the world before Christianity; alas, are they not still with us?
When Jesus shall succeed in pacifying his own disciples; in healing the sectarian world of its endless and bitter quarrels, then it will be time to ask what else Jesus has done for humanity.
If the world is improving at all, and we believe it is, the progress is due to the fact that man pays now more attention to this life than formerly. He is thinking less of the other world and more of this. He no longer sings with the believer:
The world is all a fleeting show
For man's delusion given.
Its smiles of joy, its tears of woe,
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,
There's nothing true but heaven.
How could people with such feelings labor to improve a world they hated? How could they be in the least interested in social or political reforms when they were constantly repeating to themselves—
I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger—
I can tarry, I can tarry, but a night.
That these same people should now claim not only a part of the credit for the many improvements, but all of it—saying that, but for their religion the "world would now have been a hell," [Footnote: Rev. Frank Gunsaulus, of the Central Church, Chicago. See A New Catechism.—M. M. Mangasarian.] is really a little too much for even the most serene temperament.
Which of the religions has persecuted as long and as relentlessly as
Christianity?
Which of the many faiths of the world has opposed Science as stubbornly and as bitterly as Christianity?