1. That the clergy claim and receive a large measure of public confidence on the ground that they are the guardians of the most sacred and beneficent truths, yet impose on the less educated masses a preposterous collection of untruths, or statements which many of their own scholars, and most lay scholars, regard as untrue. 2. That the clergy pose as the most sensitive and effective custodians of our morals, yet their procedure is unjust, spiteful, and deceptive to an extent which would not be tolerated in any lay profession. 3. That the clergy represent that their creed civilised Europe and is necessary for the maintenance of its civilisation, yet their influence and their ideas retarded the evolution of European civilisation for centuries, and retard it to-day wherever they have sufficient power or are immune from weighty criticism. In enumerating the untruths which are still imposed by the clergy, I will not linger over the Old Testament. When you censure them to-day for attaching a sacred value to this collection of ancient Jewish literature, they are apt to reply that your criticism is forty years out of date. Every educated clergyman, they exclaim, now acknowledges that the Old Testament is a mixture of Babylonian legends, primitive tribal traditions, and moral literature of a naïve and very interesting description. Whether this statement is true or no I must leave to the judgment of those who have a closer acquaintance with the modern clergy. Only two years ago I was persuaded, in an idle hour on a liner, to listen to a sermon delivered by a young clergyman who had just issued, with honours, from a highly modern Wesleyan college. It was on the miracles of Moses in the wilderness--ingeniously relieved by references to such other miracles as the appearance of a cross to Constantine--and accepted them as literally as did Peter the Hermit. Religious periodicals and books and parish-magazines suggest that there is a good deal still of this medieval credulity; or that, at least, the number of "educated clergymen" must be somewhat restricted. But let us accept the assurance that the educated clergy do accept the Old Testament at its true historical value. In which case we must be content to express our surprise that no clergyman seems to have the least scruple about imposing these things on young children, and rustic congregations, and less cultivated races--than which there is no more cowardly form of untruth: and that some of the most notoriously unreliable and barbaric pages of the Old Testament are read, Sunday by Sunday, as "the word of God" in all the Christian Churches of the world, under the official orders of every ecclesiastical authority in the world.