T HE famous correspondence which was carried on in the Daily
Telegraph during the concluding three months of last year—or rather a selection therefrom—has been republished in book form (Hodder and Stoughton, 3s. 6d.) The subject was started, as our readers will doubtless remember, by a letter signed " Oxoniensis," which appeared just before the opening of the Church Congress. Year after year that Congress, so the writer maintained, discusses points of ritual, points of Biblical interpretation, points of ecclesi- astical discipline, and the like. The whole Congress is, how ever, rendered meaningless by the fact that it takes too much for granted, starting from a platform not universally accepted. It 'assumes that we are Christians,' that we all believe. But " do we .believe ? and if so, what P Are we all Christians ? and if so, in what sense of that ambiguous term ?" " Oxoniensis " enters into no niceties of metaphysical theology. He deals with broad issues on common ground. All forms of Christianity postulate a future life, a life infinitely more important, infinitely longer, than this, for• which the present life is but a preparation. Do we act as if we believed that this world -was a preparation for the next ? he asks. " Is the prevalent cast of our minds one in which the present is tinged with the mystery of the future ?" "The Sermon on the Mount is, I suppose," he continues, " our ethical text- book, just as the Divine Founder of our religion is the great exemplar of how we ought to live." For the sake of briefness be tabulates the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount as it is illustrated by the life of Christ, and the ideals of the world as he sees them. The first are, he says, the ideals of "poverty," " humility," " absence of revenge," " self-sacrifice," " inno- cence," purity of thought as well as action, and love towards enemies. The ideals of the world are " wealth," "ostentation," " notoriety," " self-assertion," " selfishness," " compromise (the ideal of the politician)," and "fashionable impurity." Which of these two creeds, he asks, do we believe ? "They areabsolutely antithetical and contradictory."
This letter was immediately answered by a writer signing himself " X." We will give as shortly as we are able the gist of his admirably expressed letter. To the question, " Do we believe?" he returns a distinct negative. " No. What realistic mind dare speak for the majority and affirm the contrary ? " But ho puts another like question which he answers in the affirmative : " Are we religious ? Yes." We are, he main- tains, less dogmatic, but not less devout. As to whether we practise, that, he says, is not a question specially belonging to to-day. Did they practise Christianity in the ages of faith ? Nevertheless, the Christian religion has been, he believes, the greatest ally which morality has ever had. He gives voice to that "calm and poignant pessimism " which he regards as the prevalent attitude of mind among the thoughtful of to-day, to whom he says : " Mere atheism seems, from the intellectual and scientific point of view, less rational than the crudest tenets of the straitest sects." Apart from "that conviction of the essential Divinity of the unseen, the dogmas rattle like dry bones in Ezekiel's valley where no wind blowsi." In the differences between the sects, he writes, • "modern men take less and less -interest.- The Churches present different .façades; but the variety of architecture is less important than the fact that the foundations are 'slowly settling under thelot."..
On these two letters hang all the rest,—or perhaps we should' say all those of ' intrinsic interest. The mass of believing and unbelieving writers have nothing original to say, and their views are only of consequence in so far as their numbers point" to the prevalence of their respective atti- tudes of mind. We are told that, taking the answers as a whole, and counting both those which the Daily Telegraph pub- lished and those which the editor suppressed, it might roughly be said that the " believers " were to the unbelievers as twelve is to one. The division, however, must in the nature of things be so rough as to make the computation of little value.
To consider first what may be called for convenience the unintellectual letters,—those, that is to say, whose writers show little cultivation and little familiarity with what has been said by the educated, on both sides of the matter at issue. We cannot help thinking that those who profess belief in the Christian religion show greater intelligence than those who bluntly assert the absurdity of all faith in the supernatural. The simpler believers all found their creed Upon their need. Such-and-such doctrines . have, they say, upheld. them in such-and-such hours of adversity. They have received strength, consolation, and a sense of sympathy, for which, apart from the truths of the religion in which they were brought up, they are unable to account. The un- believers, on the' other hand, almost all base their unbelief—. and the odd thing is that these very badly informed persons express real dogmatic atheism, which they evidently regard as a badge of intellectual ability—upon certain statements of a scientific nature in the Old Testament which they have recently discovered to be erroneous. Feeling assured that Adam was "a myth," and that the world was not made in six days, they profess themselves, as a consequence, unable to assent to the doctrine of a Supreme Being. The most weighty conclusion to be drawn from these irritating epistles is that the doctrine of verbal inspiration and the spiritual pride engendered by ignorance are fruitful parents of infidelity. .
To return to the writings of reasonable men. Few even among those who profess faith could successfully pass what we might call an Early Victorian teat of orthodoxy. Faith is generally taken to mean confidence in God as He was revealed in Christ, and the essential difference between belief and .knowledge is seldom forgotten. Almost all admit .tacitly or explicitly that unless the Church will com- prehend those believers whose creeds are shorter than any formulary of any Christian sect, her numbers will be woefully small. The following extract from one of the letters expresses roughly the religious position of very many writers :—" I believe in one God only, who is to me a friend, long-suffering
and of great kindness For forms and creeds . I care not one jot." That such a God was revealed by Christ, and by Him alone, is regarded as certain, and the letter throws a curious sidelight upon those somewhat puzzling words of our Lord: "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." An extract from a letter signed by a doctor may serve as a fair specimen of the so-called agnostic letters. " Do we (the medical profession) " believe ? " Brought into contact in the course of our daily work with all sorts and conditions of men, with sin and sorrow, suffering and death, brought every day into contact with facts often of the grimmest description, a kind of physical clergy amongst both rich and poor in a day-to-day struggle with the pale horseman, do we as a profession believe ? To ask the question, I think,
is to answer it. We do not The agnostic's' position, as it is the most reverent, is also the most logical." But-the writer goes on to assert that he does believe that " the Force or Being behind the veil has been, is, and always will be just in His awards, just in His judgments, inevitably and for ever righteous." This agnostic seems to have a very real faith ; and what Christian reading his words can refrain from exclaiming with Christ, " Flesh and blood bath not revealed it unto thee"? Many letter-writers who are unable to accept even the more essential clauses of the Christian creed declare their adherence to "the ideals of Jesus." Nine-tenths of those who call them- selves Christians give far more weight to Christian ethics than to Christian dogma, and many maintain that Christian morality is a more living power in the world* than "Oxoniensis" would make out. It is not fair, one writer justly observes, to confuse the actual conduct of the world with its ideals. "Oxoniensis's" list does not, ho says, represent the ideal, but only the practice, even of the most frivolous classes. He makes a different, and, we think, a truer, estimate of the secular ideals of to-day. They are these : " the ideal of worldly success," of "not letting others get the better of us," "not taking it lying down," of " prosperity," " comfort," " luxury," " happiness." A doctor points out that conduct is not always a test of belief. Every drunkard believes that it is better to be sober.
Taking the letters as a whole, what is to be gathered from them ? Let us imagine that we have no means of judging of the present religious position of England but that afforded us by the correspondence we have been reading. Three points strike us as wo lay down the book,—that among the thoughtful Christian morals are not theoretically questioned (though the assertion of " Oxoniensis" that "poverty" is a Christian ideal is very generally controverted), that belief in dogma is very much shaken, and that atheism is dying or dead. " X." speaks both truiy and falsely. The thoughtful in the main take little interest in the differences of church architecture. They have, at least temporarily, lost their reverence for the accessories of the sacred building. The " facades" of the churches have, metaphorically speaking, been cruelly mutilated, and the metaphysical ornamentations—all the careen images which theological craftsmen of old brought to such an excellent work—are being thrown down by the new reformers with axes and hammers. But are the "foundations slowly settling" ?
Surely "X." answers himself out of his own month.' If, as he believes, among those who- think, atheism is regarded as less reasonable than the creed of the straitest Christian sect, surely all the Churches may rejoice, for the man of science
and the sceptic work together with the Christian to strengthen those very foundations which the new knowledge fifty years ago threatened to undermine. Perhaps we may hope that some day those very accessories will be restored, not perhaps to their old position as objects of something little short of adora- tion, but as aids to worship. Meanwhile, though-the building become daily more plain and bare, and the noise of those who deface the surface of the walls daily louder and more painful to the ears, it looks as if the true worshippers might Still worship within in spirit and in truth without fear of catastrophe.
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