But then suddenly there appeared in the new number of the /Zeit Geist Review/ an article above the signature of George Holland, entitled "The Enemy to Christianity," and in a moment it became pretty plain that George Holland had not in his "Revised Versions," said the last word that he had to say regarding the attitude of the Church of England in respect of the non-church-goers of the day. When people read the article they asked "Who is the Enemy to Christianity referred to by the writer?" and they were forced to conclude that the answer which was made to such an inquiry by the article itself was, "The Church."
He pointed out the infatuation which possessed the heads of the Church of England in expecting to appeal with success to the educated people of the present day, while still declining to move with the course of thought of the people. Already the braying of a trombone out of tune, and the barbarous jingle of a tambourine, had absorbed some hundred thousand of possible church-goers; and though, of course, it was impossible for sensible men and women--the people whom the Church should endeavor to grapple to its soul with hooks of steel--to look, except with amused sadness, at the ludicrous methods and vulgar ineptitude of the Salvation Army, still the Church was making no effort to provide the sensible, thinking, educated people of England with an equivalent as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones. Thus it is that one man says to another nowadays, when he has got nothing better to talk about, "Are you a man of intelligence, or do you go to church?"
Men of intelligence do not go to church nowadays, Mr. Holland announced in that article of his in the /Zeit Geist/; many women of intelligence refrain from going, he added, though many beautifully dressed women were still frequent attenders. There was no blinking the fact that the crass stupidity of the Church had made church-going unpopular--almost impossible--with intelligent men and women. The Church insulted the intelligence by trying to reconcile the teachings of Judaism with the teachings of Christianity, when the two were absolutely irreconcilable. It was the crass stupidity of the Church that had caused it--for its self-protection, it fancied--to bitterly oppose every truth that was revealed to man. The Church had tortured and burned at the stake the great men to whom God had revealed the great facts of nature's workings--the motion of the earth and the other planets. But these facts, being Divine Truth, became accepted by the world in spite of the thumb-screws and the fagots--the arguments of the Church against Divine Truth. The list of the Divine Truths which the Church had bitterly opposed was a sickening document.
Geography, Geology, Biology--the progress of all had, even within recent years, been bitterly opposed by the Church, and yet the self-constituted arbiters between Truth and falsehood had been compelled to eat their own words--to devour their own denunciations when they found that the Truth was accepted by the intelligence of the people in spite of the anathemas of the Church.
The intelligence of the Church was equal only to the duty of burning witches. It burned them by the thousand, simply because ancient Judaism had a profound belief in the witch and because a blood-thirsty Jewish murderer-monarch had organized a witch hunt.
And yet with such a record against it--a record of the murder of innocent men and women who endeavored to promulgate the Divine Truths of nature--the Church still arrogated to itself the right to lay down a rule of life for intelligent people--a rule of life founded upon that impossible amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity. The science of the Church was not equal to the task of amalgamating two such deadly opponents.
Was it any wonder, then, that church-going had become practically obsolete among intelligent men and women? the writer asked.
He then went on to refer to the nature of the existing services of the Church of England. He dealt only casually with the mockery of the response of the congregation to the reading out of the Fourth Commandment by the priest, when no one in the Church paid the least respect to the Seventh Day. This was additional proof of the absurdity of the attempted amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity. But what he dealt most fully with was the indiscriminate selection of what were very properly termed the "Lessons" from the Hebrew Bible. It was, he said, far from edifying to hear some chapters read out from the lectern without comment; though fortunately the readers were as a rule so imperfectly trained that the most objectionable passages had their potentiality of mischief minimized. He concluded his indictment by a reference to a sermon preached by the average clergyman of the Church of England. This was, usually, he said, either a theological essay founded upon an obsolete system of theology, or a series of platitudes of morality delivered by an unpractical man. The first was an insult to the intelligence of an average man; the second was an insult to the intelligence of an average schoolgirl.
His summing up of the whole case against the Church was as logical as it was trenchant. The Church had surely become, he said, like unto the Giant Pagan in "The Pilgrim's Progress," who, when incapable of doing mischief, sat mumbling at the mouth of his cave on the roadside. The Church had become toothless, decrepit either for evil or for good. Its mouthings of the past had become its mumblings of the present. The cave at the mouth of which this toothless giant sat was very dark; and intelligent people went by with a good-natured and tolerant laugh.
This article was published in the /Review/ on Tuesday. Phyllis read it on the evening of that day. On Wednesday the newspapers were full of this further development of the theories of the writer, and on Thursday afternoon the writer paid a visit to Phyllis.
As he entered the drawing room he found himself face to face with Herbert Courtland, who was in the act of leaving.
