ld beliefs. In the clamour for reconstruction we must
clearly distinguish between the wider religious life and mere
denominationalism.

The vast host of rationalists are busy proclaiming the downfall of
religion. The war serves them as material for demonstration. The failure
of Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under which
Christendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that the
ethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference between
theoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Church
condones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood. The
quarrels between sects and divisions, the petty subjects which rouse the
ire of the orthodox mind, the persistent quibbling over insignificant
details of faith and service, have strained rationalistic patience to
the breaking-point. The Church has been found fiddling whilst Rome
burns.

Our little rationalists are right, perfectly right, when they point to
the shortcomings of the Churches. But they confuse the form with the
substance, the frailties of human nature with the irrepressible desire
to find God. They have their small idols and their conventional forms of
worship, which, if put to the great social test, would prove as
ineffective in building the City of Light as the churchgoing of the
past. Their prime deity is Science. We are on the point of developing
intelligence, they tell us; we at last see through the silly theories
about God and the Universe, which deluded the childish and the ignorant
of past ages. Assisted by the sound of guns and the sight of general
misery, we must at last realize that there is no God to interfere in the
troubles of man, and that Churches and creeds are hopeless failures.
Science, we are assured, will take the place of religion.

I am a patient and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature of
rationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and social
idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is
superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot
admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering
of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something
almost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast the
commonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries of
religion, to the detriment of the latter. "These marvellous researches
of the human eye," writes Sir Harry