There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front, and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to it? This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I may be forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as at present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest sense of the word) is _prima facie_ that which can win and possess them. It would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I write to argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural religion has been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past which we call traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and overlaying in it those specifically Christian elements, which make Christianity not only a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the morbid and even contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be clearly abstracted and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a thing rounded and completed, and deposited upon the world _in vacuo_, but was as a seed sown, which grows by drawing into itself the nourishment of soil and atmosphere. There always must be elements of natural religion interfused with the Christian religion, for though not evolved out of natural religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance, Christianity is the crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our religion as handed down to us.