But deepest and most vital of all the elements that have found their way into historic Christianity is what Christ hid there,--the equality of brotherhood. That hidden element, too, must find its way to the light. Early repressed, driven in, well nigh smothered, it has, nevertheless, never been extinguished, for it is the secret force, the most deeply vital essence of Christianity. As Bernard Shaw has said, it is not true that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and has never been tried. But in the profound words of Martineau, "In the history of systems an inexorable logic rids them of their halfness and hesitancies and drives them straight to their appointed goal." Not always by a straight road but by a sure one. Nothing is more certain than that the human intellect must refuse eventually to acquiesce in that strange, illogical, and inconsistent jumble we call our Christian civilization. Something drives it irresistibly to consistency. The Christianity of Jesus means nothing if it does not mean brotherhood. Brotherhood means nothing if it does not mean a passion for equality. The story is told that when the Duke of Wellington, who, like so many other great soldiers of other times and of our own, was a devout man, was kneeling to receive the Communion in the village Church near his estate, a humble neighbour found himself, to his consternation, kneeling close beside the great Duke. He was rising at once to move away when the Duke put out his hand and detained him, saying, "We are all equal here." It was a fine spirit that the Duke showed for the time and in a country such as England was then. But it holds in it explosives of which probably the Duke did not dream. Equal at the table of their Common Lord! Then equal everywhere! Equality everywhere or equality nowhere! The soul of every man who has seen the divine beauty of equality must forever war against all limitations and impairments of it. Even human logic can not permanently tolerate such a fundamental incompatibility and irrationality as religious equality and social inequality sleeping in the same bed. Religious equality has already worked itself out in political equality. Even in aristocratic England the last vestige of political inequality has disappeared. The accepted formula is now--one man, one vote. It may be a harder problem to work out, but economic equality will be worked out to the same conclusion--one man, one share of all the conditions of human dignity and well being. The keen satire of Charles Kingsley in _Alton Locke_ will not always be justified. "Faix, an’ ain’t we all brothers?" asked Kelly. "Ay, and no," said Sandy, with an expression which would have been a smile, but for its depths of bitter earnestness; "brethren in Christ, my laddie." "An’ ain’t that all over the same?"