[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Your correspondent, Patricia Gilbert-Lodge,
is, like most of us, partly right and partly wrong. She is right in holding that " it is organised religion itself, not its working, which is wrong." She is wrong in her supposition that what is required is the identification of God with the higher self, and that human art, and the sense of beauty in the world of the five senses, are all that religion is concerned with. And she is not likely to find much support for her concept of minds being muddled by being wrapped up " in the cotton-wool of imagination."
But, to do her justice, however crude her remedy may be, she is right in her protest against the vicious system which regards the fourth century as a court from whose decisions there is no appeal. Others find wisdom exclusively in the thirteenth, and others in the sixteenth century. Your corre- spondent would merely substitute her twentieth century for any and all of these. There she errs with those she condemns. The position of every member of the Church should be with a faCe directed towards the future, rooted in the past, if you please, but acting in the present.
Your correspondent is largely right, in so far as beauty is sadly neglected in modern life. But she says nothing of evil, of love, death, worship, honour—are not these factors of religion as well as beauty ?—Your obedient servant, Church of St. Ethelburga the Virgin, Within Bishopsgate, W. F. GEIKIE-COBB.
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