e within my own
recollection when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing openly, was
inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated, eight centuries
elapsed (the point at issue, though technically interesting to
paleographers and historians, having no more bearing on human welfare
than the controversy as to whether uncial or cursive is the older form
of writing); yet now, within fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there
is not a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman, who
could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as Pascal
wrote his Thoughts or D'Aubigny his History of the Reformation, or that
St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the Vulgate,
or that there are less than three different accounts of the creation
jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest Progressive
will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom and liberality has been
greater in the last half century than in the sixteen half centuries
preceding: indeed it would be easier to sustain the thesis that the last
fifty years have witnessed a distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism
to Collectivism which has perceptibly strengthened the State Churches.
Yet the fact remains that whereas Byron's Cain, published a century
ago, is a leading case on the point that there is no copyright in a
blasphemous book, the Salvation Army might now include it among its
publications without shocking anyone.

I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden clearing of
the air include the transformation of many modern States, notably
the old self-contained French Republic and the tight little Island of
Britain, into empires which overflow the frontiers of all the Churches.
In India, for example, there are less than four million Christians out
of a population of three hundred and sixteen and a half millions. The
King of England is the defender of the faith; but what faith is now
THE faith? The inhabitants of this island would, within the memory of
persons still living, have claimed that their faith is surely the faith
of God, and that all others are heathen. But we islanders are only
forty-five millions; and if we count ourselves all as Christians, there
are still seventy-seven and a quarter million Mahometans in the Empire.
Add to these the Hindoos and Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, whom I was
taught in my childhood, by way of religious instruction, to regard as
gross idolators consigned to ete