Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be an exception, have dawnedimperceptibly upon the world. A little while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it hasbeen found in existence, and already in a state of diffusion. People have begun to hear of the newbelief first here and then there. It is interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted intothe consciousness of the Roman world. But when a religion has been interrogated it has always hadhitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story of a founder. The renascent religion that is nowtaking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins. It is the Truth, its believers declare; ithas always been here; it has always been visible to those who had eyes to see. It is perhaps plainerthan it was and to more people-that is all.It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of those who hold it still think of it as if itwere a kind of Christianity. Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it as Christianitywithout Theology. They do not know the creed they are carrying. It has, as a matter of fact, a veryfine and subtle theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great stretching of charityand the imagination, be called Christianity. One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the systemascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather than a sympatheticcoincidence. Of that the reader shall presently have an opportunity of judging.This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only the opening phase of the newfaith. Christianity also began with an extreme neglect of definition. It was not at first anything morethan a sect of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst the uproar and emotions of thecouncil of Nicaea, when the more enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears inaffected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal mystery of the Trinity wasestablished as the essential fact of Christianity. Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of itsgreatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had not defined its God. And even today it has to be noted that a large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creedshave come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood, that only in the slightest waydo they realise the nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think ofboth Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly Ariansas though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world forever after centuries ofpersecution in torrents of blood. But whatever the present state of Christendom in these mattersmay be, there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to give Christian beliefs theexactest, least ambiguous statement possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in itsmaturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions of its decay