nothing more than a belief in the
inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the inspiration of a
bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The Protestant, too, with
his legal creed, built up of texts and precedents, in which the
argumentative dicta of Apostles and Evangelists are as weighty and
important as the words of the Saviour Himself, falls under this
delusion. I read the other day a passage from a printed sermon of an
orthodox type, an acrid outcry against Liberalism in religion, which
may illustrate what I mean.

"To St. Paul and St. John," said the preacher, "the natural or carnal
man is hopelessly remote from God; the same Lord who came to make
possible for man this intimate communion with God is careful to make it
clear that this communion is only possible to redeemed, regenerate man;
prior to new birth into the Kingdom of God, far from being a son of
God, man is, according to the Lord Himself, a child of the devil,
however potentially capable of being translated from death into life."

Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find
words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it to
the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of
traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to thunder
into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the Scribes and
Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His teaching be? What
message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such a view of Christianity
as this insults alike the soul and the mind and the heart; it
deliberately insults God; the message of Christ to the vilest human
spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all its corruption, its falls,
its shame, in very truth God's own child; it calls upon the sinner to
recognise it, it takes for granted that he feels it. The people whom
Christ denounced with indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even
seems inconsistent with His perfect gentleness, were the people who
thus professed to know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the
sinner believe that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is
done amiss, when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most
loving of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine
God pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all
children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered by
dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant bir