For
the main reason why thoughtful men manifest aversion to the Church is
not found in dislike for her worship, or rejection of her creeds; it is
found rather in the sense of unreality in her life. Who, such men will
ask, among all this multitude of well-dressed worshippers, offering
their adoration to the Deity, visits the fatherless and widow in their
affliction, lays restraining hands upon the tempted, uplifts the fallen
or instructs the depraved, and so fulfills the true ideal of religion
pure and undefiled? What is the exact nature of their impact upon
society? Are they more merciful, more compassionate, more sympathetic
than average mankind? Do they not share the same social prejudices,
and guide their lives by the same social traditions as the bulk of men
and women? And if nothing more than this can be predicated of them,
how is it possible to avoid that impression of essential unreality
which is inseparable from the subscription to social ideals infinitely
loftier and purer than any others in human history, united with lives
which in no way rise above the average? Here is the true reason why
thoughtful men think lightly, and even scornfully of the Church. It is
not the truths and ideals of Jesus that offend them, but the travesty
of those truths and ideals in the average life of Christians.

But whenever any man attempts to live in the spirit of Jesus, the first
to rally to him are the sincere recusants from the church. He may be
satirised, and probably will be, as a moral anarchist, a fanatic, and a
hare-brained enthusiast; but nevertheless the best men will rally to
him. They rallied to a Father Dolling, they rally to a General Booth.
The types represented by such men lie far apart. One was so high a
ritualist as to be almost Catholic, the other is an ecclesiastic
anarchist so extreme that he dispenses with the sacraments. But these
things count for little; what the world sees in such men is the
essential reality of their life. One of the severest critics of
Dolling once went to hear him with the bitterest prejudice. He found
him with a couple of hundred thieves and prostitutes gathered round
him, to whom he was telling the love of Jesus in the simplest language.
"Dolling may be a Roman Catholic, or anything else he pleases," said
his critic; "all I know is that I never heard any one speak of Christ
like that," and from that hour he was his warmest friend. No doubt
similar conversions of sentime