It has become the fashion to rejoice in these entanglements. Men say that Christianity, by becoming entangled with these foreign elements, has permeated them with its spirit, acting upon them like leaven and so transfiguring them with its own value. That view I cannot share: at least not without great reservations. Were it not truer to say that these foreign elements, these outside things, these worldly philosophies and institutions, have rather permeated Christianity with their spirit than suffered Christianity to permeate them with its own? No one in his senses will deny that Christianity has done something to make these worldly things better. They would all be much worse than they are if Christianity had never touched them. But, on the other hand, Christianity would be much better than it is if they had never touched it. They have distorted it; have maimed it; have devitalized it at essential points. Dean Inge is speaking the truth when he says that Christianity has become secularized. It has become secularized not only in its outward form, but in something far deeper, namely, in its habits of thought, in its standard of values, and especially in its strivings for power, this last being the characteristic vice of the kingdoms that are of this world. Is it not a fact that for a long time past the Churches of Christendom have been engaged in strife as to who shall be greatest? There can be no surer sign of secularization than that. Christianity, in the official, or authorized presentation of it, is a _smothered_ religion; smothered almost to the point of total asphyxiation and collapse, but not quite; smothered by the vested interests of great institutions, and by the ambitions, fears and self-seekings that such interests breed; smothered by the elaborate theological defences that Christians have built, not against Antichrist, but against each other; smothered by anxieties, not unnatural in these embroilments, for its own future. If you take Christianity along with its entanglements, encumbrances and unnatural alliances: if you present it with all the secular baggage which the ages have fastened upon it, you will then find it a hopelessly perplexing thing, a thing which neither Reason nor Faith, whether acting singly or in combination, can accept. But alongside the authorized version, and sometimes hidden within it as an inextinguishable spark of life, Christianity has an unauthorized version, which the former has often repressed, persecuted and condemned to the hangman or to the eternal flames. Of this unauthorized version a fair copy exists in the hearts of men, a fairer copy in the hearts of women, and the fairest copy of all in the hearts of children--for Christianity is preeminently a religion of the young. It is the unauthorized version which has kept Christianity alive through the ages and defied the smotherers even to this day.