able
but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our
Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which
possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of
institutional and family religion, is largely absent.

To explain this brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war,
English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The
Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the
literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective
manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute
dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague
and somewhat insensible way lost its hold on the common mind. It has not
the absolute and simple authority which in religion is a necessity for the
little-educated. Few of the general public have thought very much about
the matter, but all the more they are influenced by that which has
percolated through to them from the more learned, loosening what before
was firm and tight, confusing and complicating what before was starkly
plain. This has been brought home to me as I have sat at sing-songs and
have heard a coon-song sung entitled "The Preacher and the Bear." With
apologies to the easily-shocked I will quote. The hero of the song is a
coloured minister who, against his conscience, went out shooting on a
Sunday, and, after good sport, on returning home was met by a grizzly
bear. Taking refuge up a tree this was his prayer:

O Lord, who delivered Daniel from the lions' den,
Also Jonah from the tummy of the whale--and then
Three Hebrew chilluns from the fiery furnace,
As the good Book do declare--
O Lord, if you can't help me, don't help that grizzly bear!

Here is an epitome of a far-spreading incredulity about the Bible. It is
the higher criticism in its crudest popular form, and men are at the mercy
of it. I have known a mess of officers engage in argument about the Bible
with a sceptical Scots doctor, cleverer than they. As old-fashioned
believers in the Bible they had to admit to being thoroughly "strafed" in
the argument, yet they had no way out, such as an intelligent
understanding of the Bible affords. One at least of them maintained
stoutly that nevertheless he was going to stick to the old view, however
indefensible. Such men are not free intellectually to follow the
movements of religious revival. T