erstand that the quiet happy routine of your life reels
off very smoothly from week to week. On the other hand, you give me
plenty of proof of that inner life which is to me so very much more
interesting. After all, we may very well agree to differ. You think
some things are proved which I don't believe in. You think some things
edifying which do not appear to me to be so. Well, I know that you are
perfectly honest in your belief. I am sure you give me credit for being
the same. The future wilt decide which of us is right. The survival of
the truest is a constant law, I fancy, though it must be acknowledged
that it is very slow in action.

You make a mistake, however, in assuming that those who think as I
do are such a miserable minority. The whole essence of our thought is
independence and individual judgment; so that we don't get welded into
single bodies as the churches do, and have no opportunity of testing our
own strength. There are, no doubt, all shades of opinion among us; but
if you merely include those who in their private hearts disbelieve the
doctrines usually accepted, and think that sectarian churches tend
to evil rather than good, I fancy that the figures would be rather
surprising. When I read your letter, I made a list of all those men with
whom I ever had intimate talk upon such matters. I got seventeen names,
with four orthodox. Cullingworth tried and got twelve names, with one
orthodox. From all sides, one hears that every church complains of the
absence of men in the congregations. The women predominate three to
one. Is it that women are more earnest than men? I think it is quite the
other way. But the men are following their reason, and the women their
emotion. It is the women only who keep orthodoxy alive.

No, you mustn't be too sure of that majority of yours. Taking the
scientific, the medical, the professional classes, I question whether it
exists at all. The clergy, busy in their own limited circles, and coming
in contact only with those who agree with them, have not realised how
largely the rising generation has outgrown them. And (with exceptions
like yourself) it is not the most lax, but the BEST of the younger men,
the larger-brained and the larger-hearted, who have shaken themselves
most clear of the old theology. They cannot abide its want of charity,
it's limitations of God's favours, its claims for a special Providence,
its dogmatism about what seems to be false, its conflict with what