However, we will not waste rhetoric over the past or over an impossible future. What policy have the modern clergy, who are unable to induce the State to burn dissenters, substituted for that of their predecessors? A policy that is, to a very great extent, unjust, spiteful, and dishonourable: a policy that, in the very name of truth, is marked by a more flagrant indifference to truth than you will find in any other reputable department of modern life. The first feature of this policy will be seen by any generally informed person who will take the trouble to read a batch of religious works or periodicals. He will find numbers of statements of the most amazing inaccuracy. It is, no doubt, an exceptional thing for a clerical writer to make a statement which is, to his conscious knowledge, untrue. The very suggestion seems prejudiced, but is there a vast difference between imposing official untruths on ignorant congregations and supporting these untruths by others? The constant repetition of these ancient and discredited formulæ does not induce a very punctilious temper in regard to truth. If it is quite lawful to repeat from the Old or the New Testament historical statements which are not true or are gravely disputed, why not other historical statements which have got into ecclesiastical currency? Usually, however, the attitude of the writer seems to be one of culpable indifference to the truth or untruth of the statements he makes. He finds in some previous writer a statement which supports his case, and he reproduces it without inquiry. If he were a mere layman, engaged in some branch of profane culture, he would not dare to repeat, without further inquiry, statements which he found made in his own sectarian interest by men of no high authority or original scholarship. The clergy, however, do this habitually, and one is compelled to conclude that they are more or less indifferent about the truth of their assertions, if those assertions are favourable to religion. Just as I write the press reports Dr. R. F. Horton telling a congregation that a British regiment was saved at Mons by the appearance of a legion of angels, and assuring his audience that this silly myth is "repeated by so many witnesses that if anything can be established by contemporary evidence it is established." The story has gone the round of our pulpits and religious press.