Sir Oliver Lodge warmly professes to be a Christian—and is, in fact, welcomed to read the lessons in church—to see how little is conveyed by such expressions. The supreme effort of the Churches to secure adhesions of this kind is probably found in Mr. Tabrum’s Religious Beliefs of Scientists (1910), and a study of that extraordinary jumble of the living and the dead, the distinguished and the obscure, the really believing Christians and the men who are notoriously not, will convince any person of the failure of the Churches to obtain the literal adhesion of even a respectable proportion of our distinguished men: not men of science merely—it is a stupid error to suppose that the decay of faith is more or less confined to them—but men of eminence in any department of research or intellectual life. Not one in ten of them, in any educated country of the Christian world to-day, has ever professed a belief in the doctrines or statements I have enumerated; and vague professions of a regard for religion do not concern me here.
Now I am, as I said, not passing any personal opinion on these Christian teachings: I am merely drawing attention to their position in modern life. The uncultivated masses and the body of the clergy who preach to these masses accept the miraculous birth, death, resurrection, and all the rest, quite implicitly. Here and there one finds a preacher who dissents; I am speaking of the mass. At the middle level of mental culture, among both clergy
