ans scarce, for, says his Grace,
"practical Atheists we have everywhere, if Atheism be the denial of
God." Just so; that is precisely what we "infidels" have been saying for
years. Christianity is utterly alien to the life of modern society,
and in flagrant contradiction to the spirit of our secular progress. It
stands outside all the institutions of our material civilisation. Its
churches still echo the old strains of music and the old dogmatic tones
from the pulpit, but the worshippers themselves feel the anomaly of its
doctrines and rites when they return to their secular avocations. The
Sunday does nothing but break the continuity of their lives, steeping
them in sentiments and ideas which have no relation to their experience
during the rest of the week. The profession of Christendom is one thing,
its practice is another. God is simply acknowledged with the lips
on Sunday, and on every other day profoundly disregarded in all the
pursuits of life whether of business or of pleasure. Even in our
national legislature, although the practice of prayer is still retained,
any man would be sneered at as a fool who made the least appeal to the
sanctions of theology. An allusion to the Sermon on the Mount would
provoke a smile, and a citation of one of the Thirty-nine Articles be
instantly ruled as irrelevant. Nothing from the top to the bottom of
our political and social life is done with any reference to those
theological doctrines which the nation professes to believe, and to the
maintenance of which it devotes annually so many millions of its wealth.

In order to pose any member of the two great divisions of "infidelity,"
the Archbishop advises his clergy to ask the following rather comical
questions:--

"Do you believe nothing which is not capable of being tested by the
ordinary rules which govern experience in things natural? How then do
you know that you yourself exist? How do you know that the perceptions
of your senses are not mere delusions, and that there is anything
outside you answering to what your mind conceives? Have you a mind? and
if you have not, what is it that enables you to think and reason, and
fear, and hope? Are these conditions of your being the mere results
of your material organism, like the headache which springs from
indigestion, or the high spirits engendered by too much wine? Are
you something better than a vegetable highly cultivated, or than
your brothers of the lower animals? and, if so, wha