As one reads the old beautiful story, this foot-note that explains how the Founder of Christianity was born in a stable because 'there was no room for them in the inn' stirs the mind with a wistful poignancy. The book slips down on the knees and the imagination awakes. The essence of nineteen centuries of Christian history is here. The web of all the centuries is woven after the one pattern. Shut out at His birth, His fate has been the same ever since. He came with the message of humanity's renewal. He proclaimed the most revolutionary doctrine ever preached to men--that the pariahs of humanity, publicans, sinners, slaves, those ignorant of the law and therefore accursed, were all the sons of God; and that only one law was requisite, that men should love one another with a love that gleamed red with sacrificial blood. But what have men done with this evangel? They have shut it out! It was too beautiful for their gross hearts and their self-clouded eyes. It was also very difficult. It required the changed heart and the transfigured life. And that has always been most difficult--to transmute the self-centred into the God-centred and all it means. So men set themselves to circumvent that demand for the surrendered heart--and they offered the surrendered brain. That is quite easy. They formulated logical propositions setting forth that thus and thus God acted, and they said--'Believe this and be saved, or disbelieve and be damned!' Christianity that came into the world as spirit and life became mere intellectual gymnastics! And with the name of the Lord of Love on their lips Christians cheerfully burnt each other because their definitions differed.... What an amazing fate to overtake the most beautiful thing that ever was seen on the earth! ... A Borgia sits on the throne of St. Peter; Calvin burns Servetus; the Jesuit exterminates his opponents; the Covenanter proclaims that he prefers to die than to live and see 'this intolerable toleration'; and all the time the Lord Jesus Christ is shut out. Not wholly shut out, however, for He has in every age found a shelter and a welcome in the stables and the sheds, among the ragged, the mean, and the outcasts of humanity. II