Luther’s real conquest—the thing that he really did bring about, and in which numbers are now on his side, would have horrified him. Luther was the root-cause why there are to-day more nominal Christians in the world who pick and choose doctrines to suit their own taste, than Christians who submissively take their doctrines wholesale from others whether from Luther or from Rome. It is due to Luther, as much as to anybody, that so many Roman Catholics who have no leanings to Lutheranism, are only nominal Catholics. Luther, that is to say, has brought into existence an enormous number of discreditable Christians who will not openly admit that they are free-thinkers.
You have clergy of the Church of England, for instance, who read themselves into their pulpits with the Thirty-nine Articles, and do not believe half of them.
The average young man who enters the ministry of the Church of England has been reasonably mothered by a university education; and when he takes the plunge it is not total immersion. His mother—his Alma Mater—still holds him by the heel. It is in consequence, with a sort of heel of Achilles that he enters upon divinity; and over this he draws a stocking with a large hole in it just where the wear of the heel comes hardest. That stocking (containing forty stripes save one) is the Thirty-nine Articles. It has been loosely knit, it is warranted to shrink the longer he wears it, and the hole in consequence gets larger.
There you have the weakness of the Church of England. Nobody to-day in his senses is prepared to die for the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet to hold ministry in the Church he has to swear by them, and thus at the very beginning of his ministerial career discreditable conduct is imposed on him.
It is no wonder that upon that basis the Church of England is permeated with unbelief in the things that it professes. A Church, a religion, may be full of credulity, bigotry, superstition—and with all those things it may yet have a true and a living faith: it may breed martyrs and inquisitors in equal numbers and with equal facility; but, in order to do so it must have at its back something definite and distinctive that its members are prepared to die for. And if it has not that, it is bound to become before long a discredited institution.
It is an interesting and a hopeful trait in human nature that it will only believe obstinately, continuously, and in spite of persecution, in those things which seem greatly to matter. When they no longer seem to matter, belief falls away from them. And, broadly speaking, we have come to see that things do not greatly matter unless they affect life and conduct.
“The Kingdom of Heaven” is within you; and if your doctrinal test does not produce good ethical results, you begin to doubt—not the Kingdom of Heaven—but the doctrine on which it was made to depend.
Similarly, if a doctrine obviously lays itself open to grave abuse, or presents strong temptation to the infirmities of human nature, you begin to doubt whether it is so heavenly in origin as it pretends to be.
The doctrine held by some cannibal African tribe that the bride’s mother shall provide the wedding-breakfast in her own person, is so clearly a truckling to the prejudice against mothers-in-law—which exists even in this country—that such a religious tenet immediately becomes suspect, and we guess that it emanates not from the gods but from their maker, man.
Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminal instincts of the human race—that, from the social point of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud, for covetousness, for murder, for theft—in a word for priest-craft in all its worst forms.