This application of carnal logic to things divine, this judging the success of Christianity by the standard of success which passes muster in the crime-stained record of human society--as though it were the business of religion to keep pace with the dawdling, creeping, cowardly movement of mankind to better things, and not to hasten it with urgent calls to repent of its hesitancy--this is only one form, though perhaps the crowning form, in which the Kingdom that is not of this world has been surrendered by its deluded guardians to the kingdoms which are. In that surrender, so long an established fact that we have lost sight of its malign implications, so deeply engrained into our mental habits that we have almost forgotten that it exists, lies the true cause of the failure of Christianity, and incidentally of its once atrocious tendency to persecute. For failure most unquestionably there has been: tragic but not irretrievable, if men have the courage to face the facts. Let it be acknowledged! Let an end come swiftly to the invention of sophistries to prove the contrary. That way lies failure deeper still. The Christian Religion, in the course of its long history, has become entangled with a multitude of things which do not properly belong to it, with philosophies, with dogmatic systems, with political ideas, with the vested interests of great institutions; and especially with the habits of mind which have grown up with these things, this last, the entanglement with deeply entrenched habits of mind, being the most formidable of them all. These entanglements are another name for our perplexities. They are so many and so deep that it becomes a matter of difficulty to extract the original genius of Christianity, to recover its original impulse and power.