Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed. Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon writers in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, or behave generally as if the "Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in society and the age in which you live. Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of any other kind.