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what he may be. That calls out fresh power. It strengthens mind, hope, and will. It was this illumination that Christ gave to the world by His life and death.

From the static point of view of goodness and personality the problems of evil and free-will remain for ever unsolved. For the evolutionist the "good" for every individual will be relative to the stage in the process which he has reached, but at each stage the best he can be will be demanded of him as surely as it is in the words " Ye shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." What an evolutionist can never allow is acquiescence in a goodness supposed to be acquired and held as a possession. The evolutionist conceives "salvation" as always to be won, and his conception of the saviourhood of Jesus might be expressed by the two sayings of St. Paul :-" God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself"; and "Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you."

A great and liberating Faith is represented by the kind of modernism which Dr. Wilson champions, a faith which might be suggested and is certainly justified by what we actually know to-day of the historic process from the unorganized multitude of atoms to the cosmos of the world, from the amoeba to man. There is perceptible more than a trend, there is an actual urge forward. In a sense it may all seem to be experimental. There are failures and relapses; but the whole moves forward, as if to the accomplishment of a great design, or the achievement of an end. So much our modern science allows us to affirm. Science uses no personal terms, though it is itself the creation of the minds of men; but modern science does not forbid the interpretation of the facts it presents which man, from a very early stage in his history, has at least dimly conceived, in terms of Deity and God. His theology has evolved with his own evolution, which has been a continuous evolution of mind and purposive activity, shaping the course of his own history. The Christian theology of the future must see God in the whole process as its purposive activity, all Nature as His organ, and Man as the highest manifestation and the chief agent in the fulfilment of the purpose. Christian anthropology and ethics will not be man-disparaging

*For discussion of this view, reference may be made to Dr. Elliot Smith's chapter on " Anthropology" in the volume "Evolution," and Professor McDougall's on "Mental Evolution."

and world-denying, but will call men to find the satisfaction of their nature in God's world as His fellow-workers, by birth-right His kith and kin. Yet such an evolutionary anthropology will not be soft and easy-going. It will have the hopefulness but also the sternness of Christ's teaching. For while it will invite Man to take his proper place in the achievement of a Divine end which can only be achieved in him and through his help, it will also warn him that if ever he becomes content with his present achievement, or too comfortable in his surroundings, like some of the lower animals known to biologists, he may drop out of the stream of evolution, which is the stream of Life.

J. F. BETHUNE-BAKER

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CRUELTY TO THE CLERGY

The Teaching Office of the Church. Being the Report of the Archbishops'
first Committee of Enquiry. S.P.C.K. Tenth thousand. 1918.
The Church and the Ministry. By CHARLES GORE, D.D., Bishop of
Oxford. New Edition. Revised by Professor C. H. Turner.
Longmans, Green & Co. 1919.

The Christian Church. By DARWELL STONE, M.A., Principal of Pusey
House, Oxford. Rivingtons. 1905.

4. Replies to "Essays and Reviews." With a Preface by the LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD. Second Edition. J. H. Parker. 1862.

5. The Early History of the Church and the Ministry. Edited by H. B. SWETE. Macmillans. 1918.

I

must write this article frankly in the first person, since it is prompted by personal experience, and by thoughts which for more than forty years have never been far from my mind. What I hear around me, from many different sources, seldom really hostile to the Church in herself, convinces me that these thoughts are in rough agreement with those of a large proportion, if not the majority, of the laity in Great Britain; that nothing is now to be gained by a policy of silence; and that the authorities of the English Church ought to have no excuse for ignoring what is said about, if not to, the Anglican clergy. To put it briefly : there is a widespread feeling that these men are as sound, morally and spiritually, as they have ever been, and, on the whole, decidedly more worthy of personal respect than in those days. when they were far more numerous and powerful; but that, in contrast to this, their education is cruelly distorted in some most important particulars; that some of the Anglican authorities encourage, and nearly all permit, a progressive dogmatic inflation which is as penny-wise, pound-foolish, as the inflation of paper coinage; and that a clergy thus nurtured in professional ignorance, drifting farther and farther away from the main currents of modern life and thought, will in the long run lose general respect and self-respect, will become unhealthy even where now healthy, and will approximate more and more to the priesthood of those mysteries under the Roman Empire, wherein, "by a curious contradiction of sentiment, people were fascinated by the ritual, while they despised the celebrants."*

*S. Dill, “Roman Society from Nero to M. Aurelius," p. 549.

Seven years ago the public received the report of a committee appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and consisting of twenty-five members of the Church of England. It was representative in every sense, for it included six women. Three bishops were on the committee, with three others who have since been promoted to the bench; one Regius Professor of Divinity, and one who has since become Regius Professor. This committee reported unanimously that the complaints against the Church, though often exaggerated, contained a painful percentage of truth :

Many people, especially among the clergy, owing to intellectual sloth and indecision, never seriously endeavour to make up their minds on disputed questions. . . . Sometimes they shut their eyes and refuse to allow that such questions exist at all. . . . The clergy are often engrossed in minor matters of tradition. . . They are apt to speak in a conventional language which wearies and irritates their hearers. . . . While there has been an increase in the intellectual attainments of the people, the intellectual capacity and equipment of the clergy have not increased in a like proportion.

After enumerating "the causes of the lack of ability among the clergy," the report proceeds :

While the above causes have reduced the number of able men who seek ordination, there has been a corresponding tendency in the Church to depreciate intellectual interests. . . . The Church of England, in a way without parallel in other Christian communions, has in its corporate capacity done practically nothing to provide an adequate education for its ministry.

True, some do go to theological colleges, and "we gladly in this paragraph give a prominent place to the fact that those who have been students in theological colleges bear strong testimony to the help they have received in them. Many have there found a spiritual atmosphere to which, by the grace of God, they know that they have owed their first entrance upon a disciplined spiritual life, it may be their conversion." But here the numbers are small, and the atmosphere is often confined; thus "the present system of special training tends to produce clergy often of great earnestness and devotion, but deficient in intellectual power and alertness, ill prepared to think out with vigour and independence the questions which are sure to confront them, and apt to be confined in their sympathies and general outlook."

Let us take these confessions for our text, remembering first, that to all things here rehearsed there are not a few bright exceptions; and, secondly, that the courageous frankness with which the evil is here faced and set forth is in itself a most healthy symptom. There is no reason to despair of a community which can afford to be so honest with itself; yet, courageously as this committee has probed the wounds, the causes may perhaps lie deeper still, and may be based, partly at least, on the illusion which is ignored in this document because, if we may judge from analogy, it probably dominated the large majority of the commissioners themselves. Not in the Church alone, but in every great organization the temptation is to hide our skeletons in the cupboard. The Church of to-day is being shaken by the revelation of truths denied or concealed by the Church of yesterday yet even bishops and archbishops in our time are helping to heap up a similar moral debt which the coming generation will have to pay with interest. And, because it is the coming generation which specially interests me, I take the liberty of commenting upon this text from a point of view which is not likely to be entirely unprejudiced, but which at least is crossprejudiced, if I may coin the term. There is profound truth in Goethe's saying: "I cannot undertake to be impartial, but I can promise to be sincere "; let us all say what we really think, and the different pre-possessions will do much to cancel each other out.

Quite recently an earnest and able young student spoke upon this subject to me, as others have done before. A hundred years ago he would naturally have remained all his life at his college as a clerical fellow, or dropped at last into a college living. Even forty years ago he would, in all probability, have taken Holy Orders, for he has a real interest in theology and is fitted for the clerical life in every way but one-his emotions are quite of average strength, but his intellect is above the average. This, forty years ago, need have been no bar, but in the present world it is, so far as my observation goes, almost fatal. Able men take Orders here and there, but these are they in whom the emotional element preponderates. I speak, of course, only of cases where the decision is deliberate and not sudden, and where there is no strongly operative exterior cause, such as the pious wish of a religious and influential parent.

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