But the Bishop went further, and carrying the war into our camp, he declared that it was in consequence of faith in Christ that men did Christian work, and he spoke of men doing good work among the sick, and poor, and ignorant, and wretched, day by day because they were Christians. Does he mean to say that Mohammedans, and Buddhists, and Brahmins have amongst them no kindly work for one another? Does he mean to say that men cannot be human unless they have the special Christian’s creed? But this Christian work has been going on for 1800 years, so at least the Bishop says. Let us turn the pages of its history over and read what it has really done. When Christianity was cradled in the world, Italy and Greece had their poets, painters, sculptors, men of literary fame, orators, comedians, and tragedians. Wait for a century or two till your much-vaunted Christianity has, by the aid of forgery, fraud, and manufactured miracle, acquired some force. Wait till the priests, crushing out all other learning, have become the sole literary power in Europe. Did they teach the people? No, they kept the people ignorant. (A voice, “No.”) If any one says no, I will show century after century what Christianity has been. Your first century I will not trouble with until you show me its actual pages; your second and third centuries are crowded with the fabrication of forged evidences, the canonisation of pretended saints; your fourth century shows the same work, and marks also the quarrels commencing amongst yourselves for the spoils now large enough to excite good Christians against each other; in the fifth century Salvian one of your own presbyters, said the Christian Church had become such a sink of vice, that it was a species of sanctity for any one to be a little less vicious than the others. He says of his fellow Christians that they lie and cheat, are adulterers and murderers; that it is easier to find a Christian guilty of all these crimes than one guilty of none. Take the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries of Christianity, when infidelity was almost powerless, before Voltaire lived, before Spinosa wrote, before Bruno trod Europe round, and you have in these centuries, when Christianity was the most powerful, the dark ages of this European world, when all literature was stopped, all philosophy was hindered, all science manacled by the Church. What was the Christian work in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when Christians marched to the Holy Land? Let the plundered and miserable countries tell; let burned villages and ravished women show the way in which the soldiers of the Cross manifested their religion even to their fellow Christians. Let these pages of blood and rapine be read for Christian work. Where then was liberty or popular rights? When the king, the barons, and the priests were in power, did Christianity help the people to get liberty? It is only within the last 300 years, since