in Eastern Europe-that is to say, the existence of a compact mass of Israelites, differing in language and customs from the surrounding population, to whom they are likely to be superior in business capacity, but inferior in fighting power. To my mind it is best to frankly recognise that such conditions can never exist without danger to the public peace.

Finally, a matter of importance, which demands most careful consideration, is the coinage of the Protectorate. This at present consists of rupees, annas, and pice, as in India, and it is proposed to replace it by rupees with decimal subdivisions, as in Ceylon, which is certainly a change for the better as far as it goes. When the proposal was first made, about two years ago, it was reasonable enough, as the commercial relations of the Protectorate seemed to be largely with India; but, as the discussion has been allowed to drag on, and as meanwhile the European element has increased and relations with South Africa have grown closer, I think that if any change is made the possible introduction of British currency should again be considered.

C. ELIOT.

FREE THOUGHT IN

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

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FREE THOUGHT, AS CONDEMNED BY THE LEADERS OF ANGLICAN

ORTHODOXY

DISCUSSION is now frequent among our clergy of all schools as to why the habit of church-going is so generally on the decline in this country. According to some of them, it is due to the fact that our services are too dull; according to others, that they are too ornate and theatrical; according to others, to the fact that we happen to have no good preachers, or that the clergy are out of touch with social or political problems, or that Sunday excursion trains, Sunday concerts, and bicycles, are to a growing degree seducing an indifferent multitude, who once would have gone to church for want of something better to do. It hardly seems to have occurred to any of the numerous disputants that the fact which alarms them may be due to a deeper and far more obvious reason, and that laymen may perhaps be ceasing to go to church because our Church services are impregnated with assertions and implications, many of which they have come to doubt, many of which they have come to deny, and some of which even the most reverent of them have come to regard with ridicule.

Whether or how far this explanation is the true one is a question which in plain language I propose to discuss here; and in trying to answer it I shall, instead of dealing directly with the state of opinion which prevails amongst the laymen of the defaulting congregations, examine the opinions openly expressed and taught by the most thoughtful and highly educated of the Anglican clergy themselves.

Two incidents have lately occurred within the English Church which make such an inquiry appropriate to the present moment. Two distinguished clergymen have, on account of their published opinions, incurred the formal censure of two scandalised bishops. The clergymen I refer to are Canon Hensley Henson and Mr. Beeby: the scandalised bishops are those of London and Worcester.

Now what is it precisely that these two clergymen have done?

They have merely ventured to apply to parts of the New Testament those methods of scholarship, criticism, and ordinary common sense which the Bishop of Worcester has been foremost in declaring that we must apply to the Old; and as the honest result of obeying both the bishop's precept and his example, they have reached respectively the two following conclusions. Mr. Beeby's conclusion is that the Virgin Birth of Christ cannot be reasonably held on the strength of the Gospel evidence for it. Canon Henson's conclusion is that the Gospel evidence is equally worthless in respect of Christ's physical resurrection.

Both express themselves in the most guarded way that is possible for them. Mr. Beeby declares that he believes as devoutly as anybody that Christ in some sense was veritably God incarnate; nor does he even, so far as he himself is concerned, dismiss in so many words the Virgin Birth as legendary. He maintains, however, that the Gospel evidences for it can warrant nobody in demanding that anybody else should accept it as an historical fact; and he farther maintains that such an acceptance of it is altogether unnecessary to a full belief in the essentials of Christian doctrine. He treats it in short as a kind of pious opinion, which may still be suitably entertained by those who like to retain it, but which has for the modern mind no importance whatever.

The doctrine of the resurrection is treated by Canon Henson in a way which is more conservative, and at the same time more frankly revolutionary. He declares that he himself believes, and that no one is a Christian who does not believe, in the personal resurrection of Christ as a central and unquestionable fact; but to believe in the fact, he goes on to argue, is one thing, and to believe the account of it as given in the Gospels is another. It is no exaggeration of Canon Henson's views to say that, according to him, the Gospel account is not only a tissue of legends, the details of which are quite imaginary, but a tissue of legends which degrade a spiritual event by materialising it. That the Gospel accounts are as a fact mere legends is apparent, he says, if from nothing else, from their absolutely irreconcilable character. The stories about the empty sepulchre contradict each other in essential particulars. Still more contradictory are the stories of Christ's subsequent reappearances. One account assigns them to Galilee, another to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Dr. Sanday, he points out, has done his best to reconcile them; but has failed to do so even to his own satisfaction. In short, if tried by the tests of common sense, the stories of a physical resurrection are individually and collectively incredible. These stories, however, says Canon Henson, are not the earliest accounts of the great event, but the latest. The earliest account of it is that given by St. Paul, who exhibits its nature in a very different light. St. Paul mentions the appearance of Christ to himself as only one of a number of cognate appearances vouchsafed to the apostles, and five hundred other

believers. St. Paul, however, contended with the utmost emphasis that the risen body is not flesh and blood. The material body, so he said, perishes; it is the spiritual body that is quickened: and this, which is true of the resurrection of ordinary men, is equally true of the resurrection of Christ, which is the type of it. St. Paul's testimony is earlier than that of the Gospels: that of the Gospels does but debase and overcloud it. Is it possible, Canon Henson continues, to suppose that St. Paul believed, or had even heard of, the story of the empty tomb, or looked on 'as worthy of credence' such farther materialising details' as Christ's begging His disciples to note that He had 'flesh and bones,' and that He, like them, was able to eat broiled fish? The answer must, says Canon Henson, 'certainly be that St. Paul believed nothing of the kind.' The resurrection of Christ, His subsequent reappearances, and His ascension, were all events that took place on a non-material plane, and had, in an objective sense, no material counterparts. He rose and ascended in the spirit; in the spirit He reappeared to His disciples, just as He still does to those who are worthy of seeing Him.

Here, then, we have within the limits of the English Church two examples specially striking from the manner in which they have been obtruded on our notice of the great fact that that modern method of criticism, to the results of which everyone has abandoned the beginning of Genesis with equanimity, does not, and cannot, limit itself to those discredited chapters, but is steadily extending itself, and is extending itself with allied results, to every part of the Scriptures that deals with miraculous events-not excepting those which all the Churches till yesterday accepted in their literal sense as absolutely beyond question, and looked on as the sign and essence of the truth of the Christian faith. Now, if the opinions of Mr. Beeby and Canon Henson, which have so horrified their respective bishops, stood by themselves or if they merely represented opinions which a growing number of our clergy are, for personal reasons, now coming to share, they might not perhaps possess any very great significance. The case is, however, the exact reverse of this. Not only do these opinions not stand by themselves, but they do not represent any mental temper or process which, in any serious sense, is peculiar to those who profess them. On the contrary, they represent conclusions, or at least the kind of conclusions, to which every competent thinker finds himself— as will appear presently-forced to come in proportion as, without reserve, he applies to the matters in question a certain method of reasoning, or assimilates the accepted results which others have reached by means of it. We have to do with the results of a method, not of the temerities of individuals.

What, therefore, Canon Henson and Mr. Beeby have done is to raise in an acute form the two following questions: First, how far will this method, if used without reservations, necessarily carry any .

competent thinker who adopts it? Secondly, if—as we have seen to be actually the case-it is forcing those who adopt it to question or repudiate doctrines which all traditional orthodoxy regards as essential and fundamental, on what grounds, and by what argumentative means, do the orthodox heads of the Church, such as the Bishops of London and Worcester, propose to keep the application of it within bounds? Let us first see how far, as a matter of fact, the application of it unrebuked has gone in our Church already, not only amongst its liberal thinkers, but amongst the most conservative also. We will deal merely with points of the first importance.

II

FREE THOUGHT AS PREVALENT THROUGHOUT THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND GENERALLY WITH REGARD TO THE OLD TESTAMENT

Let us begin, then, with going back for a moment to the opening chapters of Genesis, which the Bishop of Worcester notoriously admits to be mythical. So far as these merely refer to cosmogony or ethnical history, the admission, now so unanimous, that there is no historical truth in them, need have no direct effect on any specially Christian doctrine. These chapters, however, contain one incident at all events-namely, the Fall of man, which lies at the root of all traditional orthodoxy; and though orthodoxy allows us to suppose that the snake and the apple were symbolical, it has always assumed that they symbolise a definite historical fact, of the general nature of which no doubt could be tolerated. This was the fact that the original condition of man was happy and free from evil; that from this condition our first human ancestor fell; and that all the evil that now exists in the world is due to his having transmitted the consequences of his fall to his descendants. As Cardinal Newman says, the whole orthodox Christian scheme stands or falls with a belief in some great ' aboriginal catastrophe.' But what is the Church of England coming to teach to-day? As Mr. Beeby has pointed out, its clergy of all schools have united to throw this old belief to the winds; and how general the movement has become he illustrates by reference to a work recently issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and specially intended to meet the attacks of rationalism. According to this manifesto, the Fall has nothing to do, in a literal sense, with the disobedience of any primæval ancestor. The child, says the author, is born absolutely without consciousness of sin.' The Fall comes when the faculty of conscience awakens. 'The Fall means the struggle of the twofold nature of man.'

Let us next turn to the event which for all the Churches hitherto has come next to the Fall in point both of time and of doctrinal importance. For all the Churches hitherto, just as the fall of Adam formed

VOL. LVI-No. 331

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