the
Pharisees of old--welcomed a religion which did not interfere with their
complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth, with their
special privileges; welcomed a Church which didn't raise her voice
against the manner of their lives--against the order, the Golden Calf
which they had set up, which did not accuse them of deliberately
retarding the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a spiritual,
not a material affair. In that religion, vainly designed by man as a
compromise between God and Mammon, there was none of the divine
discontent of the true religion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth of
the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with Nicodemus and
the rulers of the earth, "How can these things be?"

And there were others who still lingered in the Church, perplexed and
wistful, who had come to him and confessed that the so-called catholic
acceptance of divine truths, on which he had hitherto dwelt, meant
nothing to them. To these, in particular, he owed a special reparation,
and he took this occasion to announce a series of Sunday evening sermons
on the Creeds. So long as the Creeds remained in the Prayer Book it was
his duty to interpret them in terms not only of modern thought, but in
harmony with the real significance of the Person and message of Jesus
Christ. Those who had come to him questioning, he declared, were a
thousand times right in refusing to accept the interpretations of other
men, the consensus of opinion of more ignorant ages, expressed in an
ancient science and an archaic philosophy.

And what should be said of the vast and ever increasing numbers of those
not connected with the Church, who had left it or were leaving it? and of
the less fortunate to whose bodily wants they had been ministering in the
parish house, for whom it had no spiritual message, and who never entered
its doors? The necessity of religion, of getting in touch with, of
dependence on the Spirit of the Universe was inherent in man, and yet
there were thousands--nay, millions in the nation to-day in whose hearts
was an intense and unsatisfied yearning, who perceived no meaning in
life, no Cause for which to work, who did not know what Christianity was,
who had never known what it was, who wist not where to turn to find out.
Education had brought many of them to discern, in the Church's teachings,
an anachronistic medley of myths and legends, of theories of s