_Is not that, if we will look into the facts closely, the position of the Church? It sets before itself one paramount object, the achievement of the Christian ideal; you and I will not quarrel, I think, as to what we mean by that. It is a difficult and a delicate task that it has set before itself; and it may well face the prospect with not much less misgiving than the acrobat who sees stretching before him the gossamer causeway of the tight-rope. And it starts out with a burden of dogmas and beliefs which encumbers it, and yet in encumbering it steadies its progress. And then, just as the acrobat, growing more steady on his narrow bridge of rope, finds himself capable of walking with less and less of pole to balance him, so the Church finds that with less and less of dogma, less and less of belief, it can walk along the narrow path prescribed for it to tread. Until the Reformation, it was able to steady itself by means of three things, tradition, the Bible, and human reason; the Reformation was the moment at which it decided that it could steady itself without tradition. In the nineteenth century, faced with the important claims of the evolutionary doctrine, it found that it could make a further advance still, and it cast aside the Bible as it had cast aside tradition, content to steady itself by human reason alone. It has been left to us in this century to learn that the human reason itself is an untrustworthy thing, on which it is fatal to repose any reliance; we are now learning, consequently, to dispense with the human reason equally._ _What, then, is the end of this process, or has it an end at all? For myself, I am content to believe that it has not. From century to century, it seems to me, we learn to get on with less and less of belief in supernatural things to encourage or to justify us, and I see no limit to that development. I go further, and say that I do not wish to see any limit to that development. The less we believe, clearly, the more creditable it is in us to call ourselves Christians still. Our object, therefore, at all times must be to reduce belief to its irreducible minimum; we must believe as little as we can, and be constantly on the lookout for some method by which we may be enabled to believe even less. It is not easy, this search of ours; like hill-climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and cannot yet see the full possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of us. And just as, surely, we do not blame Luther because, with his limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible; just as we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in the human reason; so, let us hope, our descendants will not be too hard on us because here and there we were guilty, through mere shortsightedness, of setting limits to our incredulity._