of the strictures always passed on the faults of clergymen testifies to the general expectation, not wholly disappointed, that they should exhibit a loftier standard of life than other men". The severity is not so much due to the general expectation of nobler living from them as to the hatred that honest people feel for hypocrisy joined to pretensions of superiority; Pecksniff is detestable not only for the unfathomed depths of his meanness, but for the claim to sanctity above his fellows which is associated with his moral worthlessness.
The "Seventh Day of Rest" will, Miss Cobbe thinks, "survive every other religious institution"; it is, it seems, "so marvellously adapted to our mental and physical constitution". Adapted by whom? Unless Miss Cobbe has turned traitor to her former teaching, she cannot regard the seventh day as God-appointed. The nation is to "enjoy the somewhat doubtful privilege of keeping fifty-six Bank Holidays, instead of four, in the year". Doubtful privilege! Surely a "seventh day rest" will be more recreative to the worker when he may visit picture-gallery, museum, concert-hall, theatre, library, instead of lounging in a gin-palace or at a street-corner, or tramping through the dreary streets.
"Judicial and official oaths of all sorts, and marriage and burial rites, would, of course, be entirely abolished." For the oaths, granted. But why should marriage and burial rites be abolished? People will be married, I hope, and buried, I fear, in a "Faithless World" as in a religious one. The indecent Church marriage service will vanish, to the great gain of refinement and modesty, and the open and notorious evil-liver will no longer be buried in sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection, but man and woman will still join loyal hands in union unblessed by priest, and the last tender farewell will be given to the dead by lips that speak for love and not for fee.
Next will come "the reduction of the Bible to the rank of an (sic) historical and literary curiosity. Nothing (as we all recognise) but the supreme religious importance attached to the Hebrew Scriptures could have forced any book into the unique position which the Bible has now held for three centuries in English and Scottish education. . . . All the golden fruit which the English intellect has borne from Shakspere downwards may be said to have grown on this priceless Semitic graft upon the Aryan stem."
