ABSTRACT
Michael Holroyd offers a fuller summary and a more detailed interpretation, emphasizing Strachey's polished style, ironic mode and argumentative method in this attack on Christianity which delighted some and outraged others, and which in later years he was sometimes prevailed upon to deliver again. 'The Ethics of the Gospels' represents Lytton Strachey's fullest attempt to ecraser l'infame of Christian metaphysics as the basis of ethical practice. The tenets of the Christian religion may be held in many different ways; and this fact adds considerably to the confusion which usually arises whenever those tenets are discussed. There can be no doubt that all the most striking and novel teaching of the gospels is based upon the recognition of one important fact – that the value of individuals is to be judged, not by their actions, but by their states of mind. The very essence of the neighbourly love of the Gospels is its catholicity: a good Christian will love his greengrocer.
