culture who read certain statements to those who trusted him, and said within his own mind: “This is what people thought a thousand years ago”? A clergyman told me that it was with this mental reservation that he read the creeds and gospels on Sundays. What would a philosopher, or historian, or scientist say, if his department of culture were an organic association with a public and authoritative teaching, and this public teaching contained statements which a large proportion of the leading representatives regarded as false? And what would he say to any colleagues who urged him to allow these things to stand because a change might lessen the respect of the general public for their authority?
This situation reflects gravely on the character of Christian ministers. One need not attempt the futile task of estimating what proportion of the clergy believe the things they teach, but we are constantly receiving proof, especially posthumous proof, that large numbers of them do not. I have been severely rebuked for suggesting such a thing, but when I find a group of young Oxford divines saying plumply, in an important recent work (Foundations), that Christian theology is “out of harmony with science, philosophy, and scholarship,” I can only say that I trust a sufficient number of the clergy are educated enough to know it. The majority of the clergy are, however, sufficiently ignorant of “science, philosophy, and scholarship” to be in good faith, and one ought not to press the
