At Bradford, Mr. Alderman Tillett has attacked Dr. Barrett for
his warning against turning the pulpit into an organ of political propagandism, in terms which show that he does not know, or even guess, what Dr. Barrett means by personal religion and by that inward change of heart that delivers the conscience from the burden of sin. Man's spiritual height or excellence is, he said, determined by the plane to which his intellect has reached,—a standard of spiritual excellence which would place Goethe far above that "beautiful soul" of which he has left us so fine a study, and Napoleon Bonaparte far above Madame Elizabeth or any other of the devoted victims of revolutionary wrath who were made perfect through suffering. Mr. Tillett tells us that when he read Dr. Barrett's address he thought it "a rigmarole of pious non- sense." Mr. Tillett holds that at various times religion has "ruined, robbed, and desolated all the nations of the world," by which he means not religion, but false religion,—the religion of hypocrites. When Mr. Tillett says that to talk about saving souls and not bodies is "to make Christ a charlatan," it looks very much as if that would be his own real opinion of our Lord, if he were aware of the injunction to cut off an offending hand or pluck out an offending eye rather than incur the guilt that either might cause Polemical politics seem to be Mr. Tillett's equivalent for religion.
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