he official and
his oath can be extended to excuse the priest or pledged minister of
religion who finds that faith in the true God has ousted his formal
beliefs.

This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the intellectual
life of the last hundred years. It has been increasingly difficult for
any class of reading, talking, and discussing people such as are the
bulk of the priesthoods of the Christian churches to escape hearing and
reading the accumulated criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the
popularly accepted story of man's fall and salvation. Some have no doubt
defeated this universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and
honestly established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the
articles and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the
creeds they profess and repeat. Some have recanted and abandoned their
positions in the priesthood. But a great number have neither resisted
the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which they are
attached. They have adopted compromises, they have qualified their
creeds with modifying footnotes of essential repudiation; they
have decided that plain statements are metaphors and have undercut,
transposed, and inverted the most vital points of the vulgarly accepted
beliefs. One may find within the Anglican communion, Arians, Unitarians,
Atheists, disbelievers in immortality, attenuators of miracles; there
is scarcely a doubt or a cavil that has not found a lodgment within the
ample charity of the English Establishment. I have been interested to
hear one distinguished Canon deplore that "they" did not identify the
Logos with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to
the "historical Jesus." Within most of the Christian communions one may
believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not call too
public an attention to one's eccentricity. The late Rev. Charles Voysey,
for example, preached plainly in his church at Healaugh against the
divinity of Christ, unhindered. It was only when he published his
sermons under the provocative title of "The Sling and the Stone," and
caused an outcry beyond the limits of his congregation, that he was
indicted and deprived.

Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or priesthood in
which they find themselves are often very plausible. It is probable that
in very few cases is the retention of stip