There we touch the dynamic principle of Christianity, cut free from its entanglements with a mass of things that do not belong to it; the power which still keeps it alive under a mountain of verbal accretions that would smother anything less divine. In the beginning was the deed: go thou and do likewise. So presented, Christianity is not perplexing; but quite the most convincing religion ever offered either to the intellect or the heart. The perplexities have arisen from the reversal of the true order; from the attempt to subordinate the thing done to the thing said; to lay the foundations in argument and propaganda which can only be laid in actual performance; and from the loss of reality and the descent into hollowness and windiness which inevitably follows when the talkers get the upper hand of the doers, or when theology gets the upper hand of religion, which is the same thing. The deeds that I do, these bear witness of me. What other conceivable witness could there be? Not only has Christianity evolved an institutional selfishness which shows plain signs of having been copied from the kingdoms that are of this world--the strife among churches as to which shall be greatest proves that--but the very form of its thought has become infected with ideas from the same source. Even philosophers have a difficulty of getting away from the notion that the universe is an immense political state, which most assuredly it is not; while careless thinkers will constantly refer to the laws of nature as though they were legal enactments, to which they bear no resemblance. At no point has Christianity become more deeply secularized. Instead of the Kingdom which is _not_ of this world transfiguring the kingdoms that are, lifting them up to its own level, where every term of law is translated into a term of love, and the very notion of a Kingdom passes into that of a Father's house of many mansions, the reverse process has taken place. Love has forsaken its mission of converting law to its own essence, and become a timid and apologetic fugitive, harried by the police. No wonder that men declare themselves perplexed by Christianity. No wonder they find this mixture unacceptable. No wonder that official Christianity, tied up as it is with a political system which manages its own business none too well, is continually breaking down under the assaults of a critical age, which has grown almost as tired of the one thing as of the other.