s his imbecility. But this cannot be said of
the Archbishop.

Another difficulty is this. The Archbishop's sermons are hard for a
Freethinker to criticise. He seldom expounds and rarely argues. He
addresses an audience who take the fundamentals of Christianity for
granted. Yet he lays himself open here and there, and where he does so
we propose to meet him.

In the first sermon Dr. Benson is surely going beyond his actual belief
in referring to "the earliest race of man, with whom the whole race so
nearly passed away." He can scarcely take the early chapters of Genesis
literally at this time of day. In the very next sermon he speaks
cheerfully of the age of Evolution. That sermon was preached at St.
Mary's, Southampton, to the British Association in 1882. It is on "The
Spirit of Inquiry." "The Spirit of Inquiry," he says, "is God's spirit
working in capable men, to enlarge the measure and the fulness of
man's capacity." But if _capable_ men are necessary, to say nothing
of favorable conditions, the working of God's spirit seems lost in
the natural explanation. Still, it is pleasant to find the Archbishop
welcoming the Spirit of Inquiry, under any interpretation of its
essence; and it may be hoped that he will vote accordingly when the
Liberty of Bequest Bill reaches the Upper Chamber. It is also pleasant
to read his admission that the Spirit of Inquiry (we keep his capitals)
"has made short work not only of the baser religions, but of the baser
forms of ours"--to wit, the Christian. Some of those "baser forms" are
indicated in the following passage:

"I know not whether any stern or any sensuous religion of heathendom
has held up before men's astonished eyes features more appalling or
more repulsive than those of the vindictive father, or of the arbitrary
distributor of two eternities, or again of the easy compromiser of
offences in return for houses and lands. Dreadful shadows under which,
thousands have been reared."

Dreadful shadows indeed! And not thousands, but countless millions, have
been reared under them. Those dreadful shadows were for centuries the
universal objects of Christian worship. They still hover over Spurgeon's
tabernacle and a host of other houses of God. But they are hateful to
Dr. Benson. To him the God of orthodoxy, the God of the Thirty-nine
Articles, is dead. He dismisses Predestination, a vindictive God, and
Everlasting Torment. He speaks of the very "prison" where Christ is
said to have