If somebody says, "We must watch for the rise of
some new religion which can commend itself to reason," I reply, "But
how much more necessary is it to watch for the rise of some military
adventurer who may destroy the Republic: and, to my mind, that young
Major Bonaparte has rather a restless air." It is only in such
language from the Age of Reason that we can answer such things. The
age we live in is something more than an age of superstition--it is an
age of innumerable superstitions. But it is only with one example of
this that I am concerned here.

I mean the error that still sends men marching about disestablishing
churches and talking of the tyranny of compulsory church teaching or
compulsory church tithes. I do not wish for an irrelevant
misunderstanding here; I would myself certainly disestablish any
church that had a numerical minority, like the Irish or the Welsh; and
I think it would do a great deal of good to genuine churches that have
a partly conventional majority, like the English, or even the Russian.
But I should only do this if I had nothing else to do; and just now
there is very much else to do. For religion, orthodox or unorthodox,
is not just now relying on the weapon of State establishment at all.
The Pope practically made no attempt to preserve the Concordat; but
seemed rather relieved at the independence his Church gained by the
destruction of it: and it is common talk among the French clericalists
that the Church has gained by the change. In Russia the one real
charge brought by religious people (especially Roman Catholics)
against the Orthodox Church is not its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, but
its abject dependence on the State. In England we can almost measure
an Anglican's fervour for his Church by his comparative coolness about
its establishment--that is, its control by a Parliament of Scotch
Presbyterians like Balfour, or Welsh Congregationalists like Lloyd
George. In Scotland the powerful combination of the two great sects
outside the establishment have left it in a position in which it feels
no disposition to boast of being called by mere lawyers the Church of
Scotland. I am not here arguing that Churches should not depend on the
State; nor that they do not depend upon much worse things. It may be
reasonably maintained that the strength of Romanism, though it be not
in any national police, is in a moral police more rigid and vigilant.
It may be reasonably maintained that the strength of Angli