"Preach this divineness of human nature and you will once more have a living church. Preach that our oneness is so real that the best man is forever shackled to the worst. Preach that sin is but ignorant selfishness, less admirable than virtue only as ignorance is less admirable than knowledge. "In these two plain laws--the individual's entire and unvarying selfishness and his ever-increasing sensitiveness to the sufferings of others--there is the promise not of a heaven and a hell, but of a heaven for all--which is what the world is more and more emphatically demanding--which it will eventually produce even here--for we have as little sensed the possibilities of man's life here as we have divined the attributes of God himself. "Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the fearless--the souls God must love most truly were it possible to conceive him setting a difference among his creatures. Now you drive away even the merely intelligent rabble. The average man knows your defect--knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows, indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures upon his puppets. "This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant. And you are losing this prestige. Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and find you wanting--is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping forth to save himself as best he can.