eligious clergyman may be an ardent Pauline salvationist, in
which case his more cultivated parishioners dislike him, and say
that he ought to have joined the Methodists. Or he may be an
artist expressing religious emotion without intellectual
definition by means of poetry, music, vestments and architecture,
also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as
fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist.
Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine,
or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy
Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an
expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are
manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or
actual parents, in which case he is strongly suspected by the
straiter Salvationists of being little better than an Atheist.
All these varieties, you see, excite remark. They may be very
popular with their congregations; but they are regarded by the
average man as the freaks of the Church. The Church, like the
society of which it is an organ, is balanced and steadied by the
great central Philistine mass above whom theology looms as a
highly spoken of and doubtless most important thing, like Greek
Tragedy, or classical music, or the higher mathematics, but who
are very glad when church is over and they can go home to lunch
or dinner, having in fact, for all practical purposes, no
reasoned convictions at all, and being equally ready to persecute
a poor Freethinker for saying that St. James was not infallible,
and to send one of the Peculiar People to prison for being so
very peculiar as to take St. James seriously.

In short, a Christian martyr was thrown to the lions not because
he was a Christian, but because he was a crank: that is, an
unusual sort of person. And multitudes of people, quite as
civilized and amiable as we, crowded to see the lions eat him
just as they now crowd the lion-house in the Zoo at feeding-time,
not because they really cared two-pence about Diana or Christ, or
could have given you any intelligent or correct account of the
things Diana and Christ stood against one another for, but simply
because they wanted to see a curious and exciting spectacle. You,
dear reader, have probably run to see a fire; and if somebody
came in now and told you that a lion was chasing a man down the
street you would rush to the window. And if anyone were to say
that you were