nd not merely
because Science and the theory of Evolution were in the ascendant, but
still more because it was recognised that the orthodox Churches were
out of harmony with modern life; that they were ministering neither to
modern humanitarian feeling nor to humanity. Positivism survives to
this day in the person of Mr. Frederic Harrison and a few others
(including several of the leaders of the Young Turkish party); but it
would by this time have been a powerful creed if it had been really a
creed, if it had anything spiritual and _credible_ to offer to those
who are outraged by the professional neglect, self-absorption, and
intellectual insincerity of the Churches. Everyone is aware of the
failure of the Churches to touch modern life; to escape from their
grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of
old-fashioned formulae instead of finding vital, human, developing
expressions of the spiritual craving of man. Even Mr. George Cadbury
is aware of this failure, as he showed by his zeal for the inquiry
into church attendance some years ago, an inquiry which has been
repeated this year with results unsatisfactory to the Churches. The
question has been debated again and again, and inquirers have been
unable to make up their minds whether it is the Churches that are not
good enough for the people, or the people who are not good enough for
the Churches. It is a question of the priority of the chicken or the
egg. It is not known whether public sentiment is depraved because it
is alienated from the Churches, or whether the Churches are depraved
because they have excluded so many of the most powerful moral forces
of the time. Certain it is that they have offended by their
exclusiveness; by the narrowing down of interest; by the cliquishness
of those who are specialists in piety or ritual. We may observe their
habit of mind in that narrow Victorian sect which converted Mr.
Gosse's strong-willed and in many ways lovable father into an
intolerant tyrant (as set forth in _Father and Son_); that lax and
snobbish branch of the Anglican Church which failed to capture Mr.
Bernard Shaw in his youth, because it stood only for a "class
prejudice;" and those strange types of Christianity which, as Mr.
Lowes Dickinson expresses it, find no disharmony between belief in a
"Power that is supposed to have created the stars and the tiger" and
"the sentimental, almost erotic character of many Christian hymns:

Jesu,