His whole mind, which is a very
different thing from his whole spirit, leans towards authority, order,
and coherence. He must have an organised society of believers, believers
in the creeds, and he must have an absolute obedience to authority
among these believers.
But he is a little shaken and very much alarmed by the march of
modernism. "When people run up to you in the street," he said recently,
and the phrase suggests panic, "and say, 'Oh! what are we to do?' I have
got no short or easy answer at all." A large, important, and learned
body of men in the Church, he says, hold views which are "directly
subversive of the foundations of the creeds." He calls this state of
things evidence of "an extraordinary collapse of discipline." But that
is not all. He is alarmed; he is not content to trust the future of the
Church to authority alone. "What are we to do?" He replies:
"First, we must not be content to appeal to authority. We must teach,
fully teach, re-teach the truth on grounds of Scripture, reason,
history, everything, so that we may have a party, a body which knows not
only that it has got authority, but that it has got the truth and reason
on its side."
The claim is obviously courageous, the claim of a brave and noble man,
but one wonders, Can it be made good? It is a long time since evolution
saw Athanasius laid in the grave, a long time since the Inquisition
pronounced the opinions of Galileo to be heretical and therefore false.
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