sort of summary—­where his opinion is not of the smallest value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary respect—­as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns.  The modern clergyman’s interference in the working out of the secular problems of modern life has no such picturesque beauty—­and it is even less effective.

One would have thought that to have the care of men’s souls would be enough.  What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase “a cure of souls”!  Men’s souls need saving as much today as ever.  Perhaps they were never in greater danger.  Therefore, as the proverbial place for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices for which he is presumably “chosen.”  His vows do not call upon him either to be a politician or a matinee idol, nor is it his business to sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith.  If the Church is losing its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real spirituality amongst its clergy.

But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular affairs.  There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, from Plato to Newman.  I have too much respect for their courageous sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent—­that they confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred book.  They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of “the letter” that “killeth,” but of “the spirit” that “giveth life” they seem to have had but little inkling.  To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or “the Mistakes of Moses,” had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away the mysterious religious sense in man—­however, or wherever expressed.  Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence.