ng
religious aspiration; the startling pronouncements in defiant
materialism of Buechner and Haeckel now startle none but the ignorant.
The anxiety to exclude scientific facts disappears with the realization
that all truth, all knowledge, all reason, are subservient to the search
for God. The struggle between the wish to believe and the temptation to
think caused real distress of mind to many thinkers of the nineteenth
century. The choice seemed to lie between atheism and blind submission
to authority. "Let us humbly take anything the Bible says without trying
to understand it, and not torment ourselves with arguments," said
Charles Kingsley. "One word of Scripture is more than a hundred words of
man's explaining." The modern mind does not dread the meeting of science
and religion. It does not labour to reconcile them. It is conscious of
their ultimate identity and their present insufficiency. Hence a new
tolerance which is mistaken for indifference by the zealots on both
sides. Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations of
Bradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle against
religious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason and
science at a time when religionists fought to exclude both.

It is not science which is undermining the future of institutional
religion. There is a new enemy, more subtle and more powerful. It is
the growing consciousness of an intolerable inconsistency between
religious theory and practice. The war thus becomes a stumbling-block to
faithfulness to conventional Christianity, and the glee of the
rationalist is pardonable. I again quote Mr. McCabe:

What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country
did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the
incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to
confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or
used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody
business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians
and promoters of high conduct?

Apart from the fact that the Pope and some lesser religious leaders have
denounced and deplored the conflict, and that a comprehensive answer to
Mr. McCabe's question would somewhat modify the implied moral impotence
of the clergy, we might ask the same questions of the leaders of
secularist morality. What have they done to prevent the conflict? Why
have their intellect