The Divine Detective

Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there are
even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to most modern
books. A detective story generally describes six living men discussing
how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally
describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive. But
those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted one thing, that
when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged. "That," says
Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a private detective"; after he
has caught he can set free. The Christian Church can best be defined as
an enormous private detective, correcting that official detective--the
State. This, indeed, is one of the injustices done to historic
Christianity; injustices which arise from looking at complex exceptions
and not at the large and simple fact. We are constantly being told that
theologians used racks and thumbscrews, and so they did. Theologians
used racks and thumbscrews just as they used thimbles and three-legged
stools, because everybody else used them. Christianity no more created
the mediaeval tortures than it did the Chinese tortures; it inherited them
from any empire as heathen as the Chinese.

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and
employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture, if
we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real difference
between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The State, in all
lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and
brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal everywhere. The
Church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery
of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to
pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to
forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the weaknesses of the
religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the world. Its
speciality--or, if you like, its oddity--was this merciless mercy; the
unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay.

I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays on
somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in America.
The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent experiment,
dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure as he passes
through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire to make cheap fun
of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people; that is a point
of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions have been abrupt.
This saviour's method of making people good is to tell them how good they