Canon Scott Holland’s precise words were: “It is no petulant boy making his petulant repudiation, but a man with steady and deliberate judgment, weighing, examining, testing, and still, at last to his own sorrow, to his own confessed cost, bravely facing what he deems to be the fact, and pronouncing, ‘I am not of the Body; I cannot share the life of the Christian community.’ And yet, if we look at him, we recognise in every detail of his character the lines that lead to Christ. He illustrates and exhibits the very temper which Christ blesses; he is pure, unselfish, humble, and good.... He may say what he pleases, but Christ has not forsworn him.” Subsequently he acknowledges in moving terms that, as the populations are emerging from out of their darkness, so they are repudiating the name of Christ. But he gives no explanation for a circumstance so perplexing to a Christian.
Let me not be misunderstood to say that this extremely lenient view towards the Agnostic is the usual one at present. On the contrary, the Bishop of Moray voices the opinion of the majority of the orthodox when (at the Diocesan Synod held at Inverness Cathedral in the autumn of 1904) he challenges the wisdom of this sympathetic attitude, and asks: “Is this a time to banish into silence, or relegate to an inferior position, the great bulwark of the Faith—the Athanasian Creed?” We are to understand that the curses of the Creed are reserved, not for the man who is born of heathen parents, but for the man who, often with much uprooting of his dearest hopes, and at the cost of losing many friends and even his original means of livelihood, decides that he must forsake the Faith. It seems to me that, before converting the heathen, it would be only fair that the terrible fate they will incur by any subsequent recantation should be distinctly explained to them.
Again, the Rev. J. Morgan Gibbon, in his pamphlet, Atheism and Faith, represents the Atheist in the guise of the Tempter “holding out the bribe of free indulgence of all the passions to our youth, our working classes, our governing classes, and our capitalists.” Clergymen who speak with such bitterness and make such sweeping assertions really betray the weakness of their own case. For it is a psychological fact that men are always angriest when they know they are not quite in the right. It is also a statistical fact (so far as statistics can be relied upon for facts) that crime among disbelievers is proportionately small, while among the staunchest believers, the Roman Catholics, it is proportionately large.
P. [29], line 23.—Excite prejudice by the use of a condemnatory adjective.
The Riddle of the Universe was described as a “book of rubbish” by Father Gerard, a member of the “Society of Jesus.” He has not the least authority for such an indictment. On the contrary, every single biologist would tell him that he was himself talking rubbish. The Turin Academy crowned it as the best book written in the last four years of the nineteenth century. Clergymen seem to prefer to get their science from apologetic works only. How many, I wonder, have ever read the masterly exposition of the case for Haeckel—Haeckel’s Critics Answered, by Joseph McCabe?
P. [30], lines 13–14.—“In relief of doubt.”
A work entitled In Relief of Doubt, by the Rev. R. E. Welsh, a Presbyterian minister, is an attempt by an exceedingly earnest man to remove doubts concerning the Bible. There is an introductory note by the Bishop of London. The book is written in what the Bishop terms a “racy” style, and has the merit of much straightforwardness; but few well-informed, and at the same time open-minded, readers would agree with the conclusions of the author. The argument that St. Paul was a contemporary of Christ is one of the principal features; but see Chap. II., § 3, and Chap. III., § 2.
P. [31], lines 27–8.—The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
In Priests and People in Ireland, by Michael McCarthy, there is a complete exposé of the methods and results of Christian teaching in this portion of the British Isles, and a portrait of a typical Roman Catholic priest which demonstrates his elevating (?) influence. Also see Twelve Years in a Monastery and Life in a Modern Monastery, by Joseph McCabe.
P. [33], lines 32–3.—The Roman Catholic Church is more consistent.