sion of a theology. The religious
experience may be a very good one and the theology a very bad one, but
still religion and theology are necessary to each other, and it is a
man's duty to try to make his theology as nearly as possible an
adequate and worthy expression of his religion. He will never succeed
in doing this in a permanent fashion, for the content of religious
experience is, or should be, greater than any form of statement. But
theology is everyone's business. We cannot afford to leave it to
experts or refrain from forming our own judgment upon the
pronouncements of experts. To speak of theology as though it had an
esoteric and an exoteric side, one for the man in the study and the
other for the man in the world, is a practical heresy of a most
dangerous kind. Neither should theology be confounded with
ecclesiasticism. It is my conviction that the battle with
ecclesiasticism has long since been decided, and civilisation has
nothing to fear from the official priest. Those who spend their time
in protesting against sacerdotal pretensions are only beating the
air--"We shall never go to Canossa," as Bismarck said. No, the real
danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to the immediate future of
mankind in every department of thought and action, arises from
practical materialism on the one hand and an antiquated dogmatic
theology on the other. I hope it will be understood by readers of
these pages that in any references I may make to dogmatic theology I am
passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian whose work is
being done in the field of historical criticism or archaeology or any
of the departments of scientific research into the subject-matter of
religion. Most of my readers will understand quite well what I mean.
Everyone knows that, broadly speaking, certain ways of stating
Christian truth are taken for granted both in pulpit and pew; the
popular or generally accepted theology of all the churches of
Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is fundamentally the same,
and somehow the modern mind has come to distrust it. There is a
curious want of harmony between our ordinary views of life and our
conventional religious beliefs. We live our lives upon one set of
assumptions during six days of the week and a quite different set on
Sunday and in church. The average man feels this without perhaps quite
realising what is the matter. All he knows is that the propositions he
has been taug