IV

I wish to examine the attitude of the average Christian to the Agnostic.  “The world is falling away from religion,” he will cry when depressed, without thinking how much he himself may be a contributing cause.  Let him study it in this light.  What is his attitude?  When he comes to speak of the tendency of the age he will indulge in vague generalities about atheism, socialism, irreligion, and the rest; always the cause is outside of him, and against him; he is not part of it.  I ask him to pass by the atheist awhile and take what may be of more concern.  There is a type of Catholic and Protestant who has as little genuine religion in him as any infidel, who does not deny the letter of the law, but who does not observe its spirit, whose only use for the letter is to criticise and harass adversaries.  Observe the high use he has for liberty—­drinking, card-playing, gambling, luxury; he has no place in his life for any worthy deeds, nay, only scorn for such.  Still he passes for orthodox.  If he is a Catholic, he secures that by putting in an appearance at Mass on Sundays.  His mind is not there; he arrives late and goes early.  His Protestant fellow in his private judgment finds more scope:  “Let the women go listen to the parson.”  This is the sort of saying gives him such a conceit of himself.  We have the type on both sides, so all can see it.  Now it is not in the way of the Pharisee we come to note them, but to note that, strange as it may appear, either or both together will come to applaud the denouncing of the atheist.  We gather such into our religious societies, and flatter them that they are adherents of religion and the bulwark of the faith, and they forthwith anathematise the atheist with great gusto.  The one so anathematised is often as worthless as themselves with a conceit to despise priest and parson alike.  But it sometimes happens he is a fine character who has no religion as most of us understand it, but who has yet a fine spiritual fervour, ready to fight and make sacrifices for a national or social principle that he believes will make for better things, a man of integrity and worth whom the best of men may be glad to hold as a friend.  Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the curse of every community.  We lash the atheist and the age but give little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to call our own.  What an example for the man anathematised.  He sees the vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he sees also the complacency of the better part, he is unconvinced.  We praise the sweetness of the healing waters of Christ-like charity, but despite our gospel he never gets it, never.  We give him execration, injustice; if we let him go with a word, it is never a gentle word, but a bitter epithet; and we wonder he is estranged, when he sees our amazing