that I am not a Christian. I
apologize for all the unpatriotic nonsense I have been preaching
all these years. Have the goodness to give me a revolver and a
commission in a regiment which has for its chaplain a priest of
the god Mars: my God." Not a bit of it. They have stuck to their
livings and served Mars in the name of Christ, to the scandal of
all religious mankind. When the Archbishop of York behaved like a
gentleman and the Head Master of Eton preached a Christian
sermon, and were reviled by the rabble, the Martian parsons
encouraged the rabble. For this they made no apologies or
excuses, good or bad. They simple indulged their passions, just
as they had always indulged their class prejudices and commercial
interests, without troubling themselves for a moment as to
whether they were Christians or not. They did not protest even
when a body calling itself the Anti-German League (not having
noticed, apparently, that it had been anticipated by the British
Empire, the French Republic, and the Kingdoms of Italy, Japan,
and Serbia) actually succeeded in closing a church at Forest Hill
in which God was worshipped in the German language. One would
have supposed that this grotesque outrage on the commonest
decencies of religion would have provoked a remonstrance from
even the worldliest bench of bishops. But no: apparently it
seemed to the bishops as natural that the House of God should be
looted when He allowed German to be spoken in it as that a
baker's shop with a German name over the door should be pillaged.
Their verdict was, in effect, "Serve God right, for creating the
Germans!" The incident would have been impossible in a country
where the Church was as powerful as the Church of England, had it
had at the same time a spark of catholic as distinguished from
tribal religion in it. As it is, the thing occurred; and as far
as I have observed, the only people who gasped were the
Freethinkers. Thus we see that even among men who make a
profession of religion the great majority are as Martian as the
majority of their congregations. The average clergyman is an
official who makes his living by christening babies, marrying
adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he can (when he
has any conscience about it) of a certain routine of school
superintendence, district visiting, and organization of
almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christianity at any
point except the point of the tongue. The exceptional or
r