NATIONAL IDEALISM AND RELIGION
To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sin,The letter from Professor Maurice Belton is frankly a pathetic dOcutnent.. He notes storm-clouds once more darkening over Christian Europe and he asks the nation to bestir itself by returning to its old allegiance to the national Church: Is he not aware that he is too late ? That the heads of his Church have themselves given up their allegiance to orthodoxy ? The latest Bampton Lectures, originally framed in the interests of orthodoxy, give up the historical
records of the four "Gospels and deny the divinity of ChriSt as well as His resurrection. The Guardian as frankly asserts
the Creeds to be " true mythologically " and the Resur- rection to be " a sacred legend," and this week's leading article gives up all the fixed points that Lightfoot and
Westcott and Host bequeathed to Cambridge. The Arch- bishop of York's latest comthissionce on the Relations between Church and State gives up, as ex-professor of Biblical
Exegesis at Oriel, all serious belief in fundamental points of
the Gospels.- What allegiartee'doe.s Professor Maurice Relton ask the nation to give—an allegiance to what his ohm authorities have themselves repudiated—a non-miraculous
Christianity like Dean Inge's or the " inspired 'Myths " of Dr. Gore ?
Sir R. W. Livingstone, President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, has just told us in his latest book on Greek Ideals and Modern Life that " we do not know what to believe," and that " the majority of men have exchanged the certainty of faith for the twilight of opinion; Christianity is no longer the creed of Europe and nothing has taken its place." That is why the last war came. So the Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester tells us. It was due to-
" The shifting of the centre of gravity from God to Man with the resultant growth of -a humanist instead of a theological out-; look upon life. And then as a swift and irresistible blow the Great War . . . hastened the exhaustion of the forms of religious thought."
Is the same to happen again ? The militant atheism of Russia and Japan and the new paganism of Germany are
piling up their arms for the coming conflict. What does Professor Maurice, Relton suggest that we as a nation should do ? Stare super antiquas ries or frankly face the new
Science which so handsomely and harmoniously (as I have shown) meets the old Theology ? Professor Relton . has given us an unusually good study of " Christology " based on the out-of-date philosophy of Leontius of Byzantium.
Could he not save the face of the Church of England—which has in a hundred years, according to the Bishop of Derby- elect, shrunk from one-half the nation to less than one-
twelfth—by facing the present collusion rather than collision of Nature and Grace, of God's Works and His Word ? Or is that beyond an English theologian steeped in the outworn dogmas of the Schools ?--Yours obediently,
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