in their
courses are naturally regulated by the law of gravitation, not
supernaturally by the will of a god.

Darwin established the fact that all living species of animal and
vegetable life exist as the natural results of evolutionary processes,
not as the supernatural results of creative acts.

If Newton were to stand by his theological writings, he would fall in
your estimation, for his work on the book of Daniel would be regarded by
you as an absurdity. He considered Daniel to be the great revelation of
a God, Jehovah, but you know it to be the purest fiction of a man, quite
as much the work of the imagination of its author as Don Quixote is that
of Cervantes.

Among the many theological authorities whom you quote against me, the
greatest, in my estimation, is Dr. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London,
whose utterances I have been noting with great interest of late; partly,
no doubt, because he seems to be giving up your orthodox side and coming
over, slowly but surely, to my heterodox one. In a London paper which
has just reached me, the Literary Guide, this is said of the Dean:

The theological opinions of Dean Inge, one of the official
mouthpieces of the Church of England, and probably the most
distinguished spokesman for the more liberally minded of the
clergy, have now reached an interesting stage, both for those
without the Church as well as for those within it. Although he does
not feel called upon to state his own private conclusions on such
debatable questions, he no longer regards the doctrines of the
Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Resurrection as essential
prerequisites of Christianity and would consider fit for ordination
any candidate who rejected them, provided such a person still
acknowledged the divine nature of Jesus Christ--that is, he would
not exclude him from the Church's ministry.

If I understand Dean Inge as he is reported in the article of which this
is the opening paragraph, he bases his faith in the divinity of Jesus
upon the uniqueness of his character and teachings, not on the
miraculousness of his birth and healings.

But Dean Inge has no authentic or reliable account of the life and
teachings of Jesus; and so, as a theologian, like all theologians, he
lives, moves and has his being in the realm of fiction, the difference
between him and yourself being that he is in that part of it where the
imagination sits enthroned,