e Grand Fleet. His
Lordship told his hearers--we have it on his own authority--that
"there was in everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have not known
a case," he added, "where the good man conquered the bad man without
religion." Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either
telling--well, not the truth--or shamelessly playing with words? Of
course it may be said that any man who keeps his lower instincts in
control does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher values in
life than sensual gratification or direct self-gratification of any
sort; and we may, if we are so minded, call this feeling religion. But
it is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the word, and we cannot
take it to be the meaning the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in
all probability--what he desired his simple-minded hearers to
understand--was that he had never known a good man who did not
believe, if not in all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any
rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man, redemption from sin,
and the inspiration of the Scriptures. He meant that no man could be
good who did not believe that God has given us in writing a synopsis
of his plan of world-government, and has himself sojourned on earth
and submitted to an appearance of death, some two thousand years ago,
in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did _not_ mean that, he was, I
repeat, playing with words and deceiving his hearers, who would
certainly understand him to mean something to that effect; and if he
_did_ mean that, he departed very palpably from the truth. The Bishop
of London is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men of his own
faith. He is a man of the modern world, and he must know, and know
that he knows, scores of men as good as himself who have no belief in
anything that he would recognize as religion. Perhaps he was not
directly conscious of telling a falsehood, for "faith" plays such
havoc with the intellect that men cease to attach any living meaning
to words, and come to deal habitually in those unrealized phrases
which we call cant. But whatever may have been his excuses to his
conscience, he was saying a very noxious thing to the simple, gallant
souls who heard him. Many of them must have been well aware that they
had no faith that would have satisfied the Bishop of London, and that
whatever religious ideas lurked in their minds were of very little use
to them in struggling with the temptations of a sailor's life. Where