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This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the
intellectual life of the last hundred years. It has been
increasingly difficult for any class of reading, talking, and
discussing people such as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the
Christian churches to escape hearing and reading the accumulated
criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the popularly accepted
story of man's fall and salvation. Some have no doubt defeated this
universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and honestly
established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles
and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they
profess and repeat. Some have recanted and abandoned their
positions in the priesthood. But a great number have neither
resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which
they are attached. They have adopted compromises, they have
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential
repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors
and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of
the vulgarly accepted beliefs. One may find within the Anglican
communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in
immortality, attenuators of miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a
cavil that has not found a lodgment within the ample charity of the
English Establishment. I have been interested to hear one
distinguished Canon deplore that "they" did not identify the Logos
with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to
the "historical Jesus." Within most of the Christian communions one
may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not
call too public an attention to one's eccentricity. The late Rev.
Charles Voysey, for example, preached plainly in his church at
Healaugh against the divinity of Christ, unhindered. It was only
when he published his sermons under the provocative title of "The
Sling and the Stone," and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his
congregation, that he was indicted and deprived.
Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or
priesthood in which they find themselves are often very plausible.
It is probable that in very few cases is the retention of stipend or
incumbency a conscious dishonesty. At the worst it is mitigated by
thought for wife or child. It has only been during very exceptional
phases of religious development and controversy that beliefs have
been really sharp. A creed, like a coin, it may be argued, loses
little in practical value because it is worn, or bears the image of
a vanished king. The religious life is a reality that has clothed
itself in many garments, and the concern of the priest or minister
is with the religious life and not with the poor symbols that may
indeed pretend to express, but do as a matter of fact no more than
indicate, its direction. It is quite possible to maintain that the
church and not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of
religion, that the religious life is sustained not by its
propositions but by its routines. Anyone who seeks the intimate
discussion of spiritual things with professional divines, will find
this is the substance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.
His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement of truth, but where
else is truth? What better formulae are to be found for ineffable
things? And meanwhile--he does good.
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