I feel like covering my face for telling you so grewsome a tale. But if this were the fourth or the fifth century, instead of the twentieth, and this were Constantinople, or Alexandria, or Antioch, instead of Chicago, I would have spent just such a Sunday as I have described to you. In giving you this concentrated view of human society in the great capitals of Christendom in the year 400, I have restrained, rather than spurred, my imagination. Remember, also, that I have confined my remarks to a specific and short period in history, and have excluded from my generalization all reference to the centuries of religious wars which tore Europe limb from limb,--the wholesale exterminations, the crusades, which represented one of the maddest spells of misguided and costly zeal which ever struck our earth, the persecution of the Huguenots, the extermination of the Albigenses and of the Waldenses,--the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Inquisition with its red hand upon the intellect of Europe, the Anabaptist outrages in Germany, the Smithfield fires in England, the religious outrages in Scotland, the Puritan excesses in America,--the reign of witchcraft and superstition throughout the twenty centuries--I have not touched my picture with any colors borrowed from these terrible chapters in the history of our unfortunate earth. I have also left out all reference to Papal Rome, with its dungeons, its stakes, its massacres and its burnings. I have said nothing of Galileo, Vanini, Campanella or Bruno. I have passed over all this in silence. You can imagine, now, how much more repellant and appalling this representation of the Roman world under Christianity would have been had I stretched my canvas to include also these later centuries. But I tremble to be one-sided or unjust, and so I hasten to say that during the twenty centuries' reign of our religion, the world has also seen some of the fairest flowers spring out of the soil of our earth. During the past twenty centuries there have been men and women, calling themselves Christians, who have been as generous, as heroic and as deeply consecrated to high ideals as any the world has ever produced. Christianity has, in many instances, softened the manners of barbarians and elevated the moral tone of primitive peoples. It gives us more pleasure to speak of the good which religions have accomplished than to call attention to the evil they have caused. But this raises a very important question. "Why do you not confine yourself," we are often asked, "to the virtues you find in Christianity or Mohammedanism, instead of discussing so frequently their short-comings? Is it not better to praise than to blame, to recommend than to find fault?" This is a fair question, and we may just as well meet it now as at any other time.