I fear sometimes that any attempt now to reconcile the Christian story to the world, or to posit it as true, is to evoke indignation, if not outright dismissal, from those to whom one would speak, and maybe that is inevitable, I do not know. Christianity no longer has the reputation that I imagine it might have had in the first centuries of its existence, when it was outlawed by the Roman Empire, and was subject to persecution. Of course, whether or not it is outlawed does not alter the truths that have been entrusted to it, but any sympathy or interest that might once have accrued to it, among people who otherwise had no association with it, I think has vanished. That it has been, in no small way, the actions of those representing the religion, throughout the centuries, that have caused this sympathy or interest to vanish is a painful truth, though not necessarily a truth that the Church herself has ever been ignorant to the possibility of. For one of her most manifest or evident doctrines surely would be this: as long as humankind has free will, it is subject to error, temptation, and sin.