There was a passing gibe at theologians a moment ago, but one has only to remember how great a thing it is they study, one has only to descry for a moment the ancient and glorious realm in which the minds and imaginations of theologians have their being, to know and understand their integrity and passion. But theology is now, like so many names, a misnomer. By the application of scientific methods the more rigorous minds, although still speaking--I think, equivocally--of theology, have really brought about a theonomy. Scientific method destroyed astrology, and gave us in exchange for a superstitious obsession, astronomy and the Universe. Scientific method has destroyed theology. But the theologians, powerless to admit it because most humanly reluctant to drop so sublime a thing, have allowed themselves to gloze the Material God who made the world, who sent His son to die for sinners, who reared high Heaven and dug deep Hell--I say the theologians have thought away all this that was so great, and have spun out, not the heart of it but the husk of it, into a metaphysical idea of God; have, the more advanced and veracious minds among them, set aside the incarnation and the atonement, offering instead the engaging person and beautiful immorality of Christ:--still an immorality, Christ's teaching; let anyone attempt to turn the other cheek in any playground, parliament, court of justice, college, exchange, club, or Convocation, and he will know with a vengeance what it means to be immoral:--and in the matter of Heaven and Hell, have, most honestly, nothing to say; whereas the true theonomist finds the study of God to be a branch of mythology. In my ballads I have employed this of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell as the warp of myth in the loom of my poetry, giving the myth also a new orientation as the weaver changes the pattern of his web--an orientation which I have carried to its utmost limit in the Judgment-day of the "Prime Minister"; but no individual mind and imagination, and no general mind and imagination of any class, mass, or mob of men can enter a fateful battle in the name of a metaphysic, can live highly and die serenely to the tune of a mere folklore. I cry aloud with the Bishop of St. James's:--