that even among men who make a profession of religion the great
majority are as Martian as the majority of their congregations. The
average clergyman is an official who makes his living by christening
babies, marrying adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he
can (_when he has any conscience about it_) of a certain routine of
school superintendence, district visiting, and organization of
almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christianity at any point
except the point of the tongue. The exceptional or religious clergyman
may be an ardent Pauline salvationist, in which case his more
cultivated parishioners dislike him, and say that he ought to have
joined the Methodists. Or he may be an artist expressing religious
emotion without intellectual definition by means of poetry, music,
vestments and architecture, also producing religious ecstacy by
physical expedients, such as fasts and vigils, in which case he is
denounced as a Ritualist. Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like
Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist
to whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and
Son are an expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are
manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or actual
parents, in which case he is strongly suspected by the straiter
Salvationists of being little better than an Atheist. All these
varieties, you see, excite remark. They may be very popular with their
congregations; but they are regarded by the average man as the freaks
of the Church. The Church, like the society of which it is an organ, is
balanced and steadied by the great central Philistine mass above whom
theology looms as a highly spoken of and doubtless most important
thing, like Greek Tragedy, or classical music, or the higher
mathematics, but who are very glad when church is over and they can go
home to lunch or dinner, having in fact, for all practical purposes, no
reasoned convictions at all, and being equally ready to persecute a
poor Freethinker for saying that St. James was not infallible, and to
send one of the Peculiar People to prison for being so very peculiar as
to take St. James seriously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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