Never forget that we are still ‘the early Christians’.  The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy:  we are still teething.  The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age.  But it has thought that very often before.  Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the phyusical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements.  But every time the world has been disappointed.  its first disappointment was over the crucifixion.  The Man came to life again.  In a sense–and I quite relise how fightfully unfair it must seem to them–that has been happening ever since.  They keep on kiling the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are pating down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place.  No wonder they hate us.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 11, The New Man