THE PREACHER'S WORLD
"Thou art smitten, thou God," shouted Swinburne vociferously,
thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord.
And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings—
Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.
Now it was hardly to be expected that in the heyday of this confident utopianism religion could remain uninfluenced and immune. The Bible might insist that "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour," but theological liberalism smiled to itself in a superior and even contemptuous way: it was not going to take such rhetoric too seriously. The conceptions of the world as fallen, of human nature as infected with a radical taint, of sin as a vicious circle which could be broken through only by supernatural action from outside—these were classed as outmoded fictions, and relegated to the scrap-heap of an antiquated theology. The evolutionary hypothesis, so fruitful in other fields, began to invade the deepest sanctities of the soul: it now appeared that all man had to do for his redemption was to
Move upward, working out the beast.
And let the ape and tiger die.
The Kingdom of Heaven was not, as Jesus and the apostles had proclaimed it, a gift of God breaking into history from the beyond: it was a human achievement,
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