absolute obedience to authority
among these believers.

But he is a little shaken and very much alarmed by the march of
modernism. "When people run up to you in the street," he said recently,
and the phrase suggests panic, "and say, 'Oh! what are we to do?' I have
got no short or easy answer at all." A large, important, and learned
body of men in the Church, he says, hold views which are "directly
subversive of the foundations of the creeds." He calls this state of
things evidence of "an extraordinary collapse of discipline." But that
is not all. He is alarmed; he is not content to trust the future of the
Church to authority alone. "What are we to do?" He replies:

"First, we must not be content to appeal to authority. We must teach,
fully teach, re-teach the truth on grounds of Scripture, reason,
history, everything, so that we may have a party, a body which knows not
only that it has got authority, but that it has got the truth and reason
on its side."

The claim is obviously courageous, the claim of a brave and noble man,
but one wonders, Can it be made good? It is a long time since evolution
saw Athanasius laid in the grave, a long time since the Inquisition
pronounced the opinions of Galileo to be heretical and therefore false.
"It is very hard to be a good Christian." Did Athanasius make it easier?
Did the Inquisition which condemned Galileo make it easier still?

Dr. Gore thinks that the supreme mistake of Christianity was placing
itself under the protection and patronage of national governments. It
should never have become nationalised. Its greatest and most necessitous
demand was to stand apart from anything in the nature of racialism.

He mourns over an incoherent humanity; he seeks for unifying principles.
The religion of an Incarnation must have a message for the world, a
message for the whole world, for all mankind. Surely, surely. But
unifying principles are not popular in the churches. It is the laity
which objects to a coherent Gospel.

He sighs for a spiritualised Labour Party. He shrinks from the thought
of a revolution, but does not believe that the present industrial system
can be Christianised. There must be a fundamental change. Christianity
is intensely personal, but its individualism is of the spirit, the
individualism of unselfishness. He laughs grimly, in a low and rumbling
fashion, on hearing that Communism is losing its influence in the north
of England. "I can quite imagine that; the l