There is, we must confess, a recurring note in modern thought, the constant use of which is amounting almost to a popular mannerism. It is a method of reasoning which inclines men to spurn deep convictions or strong single-minded purpose as clumsy, uncouth, and unphilosophic, and to welcome in their place involved generalisations and a spirit of abstract compromise and theoretical balancing. Whether this tends to a more profound acquisition of knowledge and a more exact and scientific adjustment of mental conceptions, is not for us to say, but that it casts a weakening spell over personal initiative and greatly impedes decisive action is clear beyond doubt. As for the Church, it is failing in its mission, because it refuses to insist equally on the two aspects of the message it has undertaken to deliver to mankind. If religion is received in a purely dogmatic sense, it can appeal only to our emotions and to the spiritual cravings of the more mystical side of men’s natures. This is only confusing and quite unsatisfying to our more rationalistic inclinations, which prefer a simple and direct ethical teaching. Christianity combines the two elements--the mystical and the rational--and fuses them together. Unfortunately there is a proneness to detach the former as all-important and sufficient in itself and to neglect the latter. The former has been built up gradually in successive centuries of varying and imaginative speculation, and however much it may appeal to the religious-minded, it is valueless when broken off from the latter. The ethical precepts for duty and conduct are, on the other hand, immutable, and in their pristine simplicity carry all their original force of authority and lose nothing from being divorced from dogmatic teaching. It requires no heights of spiritual exaltation to accept Christ’s explicit precepts as to sacrifice, humility, altruism, and the renunciation of worldly possessions, but men are encouraged by the Church to seek consolation in a fog of doctrinal obscurantism. Christ no doubt foresaw that we should take refuge in the incomprehensible in our failure to accept what to the humblest intelligence was perfectly comprehensible when he said, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven.” His immediate successors were not handicapped by considerations for or subservience to those in authority who held the worldly power, and they spoke with no uncertain voice. What is wanted in the Church to-day is something of the uncompromising spirit of those bygone days. Not condonation, or at the most half-hearted criticism, but wholesale denunciation in words of splendid vehemence such as the passage in the Epistle of St. James: