A Speech by Mr. G. Bernard Shaw
“The man who says Christ was the highest possible being is not worth working with. Christ was a failure.”
Mr. G. B. Shaw, leader among intellectual socialists, thus defined his views at the close of an address to a gathering of undergraduates, college dons and Girton and Newnham students at Cambridge. His subject was “The Future of Religion,” and in the course of his remarks he said: “The mention of God has gone out of fashion. You never hear about God in Parliament, and only occasionally in the Law Courts. The people are governed by a system of idolatry. Clergymen, judges and kings are all idols who generally have to give sufficient money to dress better and live better than other people. When Charles Darwin came along, with his theory of Natural Selection, people jumped at it, and kicked God out of the window.”
This man, blasphemous braggart as he is, will one day have to bow his impious knee to Jesus, and own Him Lord to the glory of God the Father. “Christ a failure”! Millions will give him the lie, whose lives have been gladdened and made beautiful by Christ. His own heart will give Him the lie when he faces eternity without Christ. His conscience will give him the lie when he stands before the Great White Throne to be judged by the Christ he dares to call a failure now.
Poor misguided man to talk with his evil tongue of God being “kicked out of the window.”
His impious soul will be shaken yet by the power of God, and the “laughter of God” will make him dumb with awful fear, when God “holds him in derision.” “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.”
But this man, utterly bad as he is, is not so vile as those of whom we have been speaking before, who, naming the name of Christ, and professing faith in the Bible, put the Saviour to an open shame, and tear His Word to pieces. Their condemnation will be greater than that of G. B. Shaw.