How little the Christian religion appreciates the nature of morality is seen by the favourite expression of Christian apologists that the tendency of non-religion is to remove all moral "restraints." The use of the word is illuminating. To the Christian morality is no more than a system of restraints which aim at preventing a man gratifying his appetite in certain directions. It forbids him certain enjoyments here, and promises him as a reward for his abstention a greater benefit hereafter. And on that assumption he argues, quite naturally, that if there be no after life then there seems no reason why man should undergo the "restraints" which moral rules impose. On this scheme man is a born criminal and God an almighty policeman. That is the sum of orthodox Christian morality. To assume that this conception of conduct can have a really elevating effect on life is to misunderstand the nature of the whole of the ethical and social problem. What has been said may go some distance towards suggesting an answer to the question so often asked as to the reason for the moral failure of Christianity. For that it has been a moral failure no one can doubt. Nay, it is an assertion made very generally by Christians themselves. Right from New Testament times the complaint that the conduct of believers has fallen far short of what it should have been is constantly met with. And there is not a single direction in which Christians can claim a moral superiority over other and non-Christian peoples. They are neither kinder, more tolerant, more sober, more chaste, nor more truthful than are non-Christian people. Nor is it quite without significance that those nations that pride themselves most upon their Christianity are what they are. Their state reflects the ethical spirit I have been trying to describe. For when we wipe out the disguising phrases which we use to deceive ourselves--and it is almost impossible to continually deceive others unless we do manage to deceive ourselves--when we put on one side the "rationalizing" phrases about Imperial races, carrying civilization to the dark places of the earth, bearing the white man's burden, peopling the waste places of the earth, etc., we may well ask what for centuries have the Christian nations of the world been but so many gangs of freebooters engaged in world-wide piracy? All over the world they have gone, fighting, stealing, killing, lying, annexing, in a steadily rising crescendo. To be possessed of natural wealth, without the means of resisting aggression, has for four centuries been to invite the depredations of some one or more of the Christian powers. It is the Christian powers that have militarized the world in the name of the Prince of Peace, and made piracy a national occupation in the name of civilization. Everywhere they have done these things under the shelter of their religion and with the sanction of their creed. Christianity has offered no effective check to the