Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal, and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers. Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers, or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is no evidence--because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be forthcoming--to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed. Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.” Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.