without abjuring his honesty was being hotly debated in reviews, in
Convocation, and at countless clerical Congresses; but these resulted in
no unanimous answer. The English Church, indeed, as a teaching body, was
held by many people to be on the very verge of disruption. The situation
was precisely similar to that which in my book, _Is Life Worth Living?_
I had myself predicted ten years before as inevitable. If Christianity
means anything definite--anything more than a mood of precarious
sentiment--the only logical form of it is that represented by the
Oecumenical Church of Rome. This had been my previous argument, and,
stimulated by current events, I felt impelled to restate it in greater
detail and with more pungent illustrations. I found particular
satisfaction in analyzing the utterances of dignitaries of the
Broad-Church party, such as Farrar and Wilberforce, whose plan for
rejuvenating the coherence of the Anglican Church was to reduce all its
doctrine which savored of the supernatural to symbols. One of them
proposed, for example, to salvage the doctrine of the Ascension by
maintaining that its true meaning is, not that Christ rose from the
earth vertically (which would indeed be absurd), but that he
disappeared, as it were, laterally, by withdrawing himself somehow or
other into the fourth dimension of space. According to another, the
statement that Christ on a specified day ascended was merely a
symbolical way of saying that about the time in question his work on
earth was finished, and that he had, like Sir Peter Teazle, taken leave
of his disciples with the words, "Gentlemen, I leave my character in
your hands." On the basis of such an exegesis they managed to raise a
superstructure of sentiment which had, until it was touched, some
likeness to the old fabric, but which a breath of air would dissipate,
and unmask the ruins within. Canon Farrar's _Life of Christ_ was a work
of this description. The work had an enormous sale, and the author, at
an Oxford dinner, confided somewhat ruefully to a neighbor that all he
got for it himself was not more than three hundred pounds. Another
neighbor, overhearing this remark, murmured to somebody else, "He
forgets that in the good old days the same job was done for thirty
pieces of silver."

A criticism of the clerical rationalists, not dissimilar in its purport,
was administered to Jowett by a certain Russian thinker, who knew little
as to Jowett's opinions, and had n