The clerical profession was a necessity when most people could
     neither read nor write.

Seminaries for the early training of future clergymen may indeed be established; but beds of exotics cannot be raised by keeping the gardeners in greenhouses while the young plants are in the open air.

     It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their
     fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed
     denominationally.

     Like other idealisms, patriotism varies from a noble devotion to a
     moral lunacy.

     Our clergy are positively tumbling over each other in their
     eagerness to be appointed court-chaplain to King Demos.

     A generation which travels sixty miles an hour must be five times
     as civilised as one which only travels twelve.

     It is not certain that there has been much change in our
     intellectual and moral adornments since pithecanthropus dropped the
     first half of his name.

     I cannot help hoping that the human race, having taken in
     succession every path except the right one, may pay more attention
     to the narrow way that leadeth unto life.

     It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of
     vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

     After the second century, the apologists for the priesthood are in
     smooth waters.

     Not everyone can warm both hands before the fire of life without
     scorching himself in the process.

It is quite as easy to hypnotise oneself into imbecility by repeating in solemn tones, “Progress, Democracy, Corporate Unity,” as by the blessed word Mesopotamia, or, like the Indians, by repeating the mystic word “Om” five hundred times in succession.

     I have lived long enough to hear the Zeitgeist invoked to bless
     very different theories.

     . . . as if it were a kind of impiety not to float with the stream, a
     feat which any dead dog can accomplish. . . .

     An appendix is as superfluous at the end of the human caecum as at
     the end of a volume of light literature.

     The “traditions of the first six centuries” are the traditions of
     the rattle and the feeding bottle.

In speaking to me last year of the crowded waiting-lists of the Public Schools, he said:  “It is no longer enough to put down the name of one’s son on the day he is born, one must write well ahead of that:  ’I am expecting to have a son next year, or the year after, and shall be obliged if—­’ The congestion is very great, in spite of the increasing fees and the supertax.”

Much of his journalism, by the way, has the education of his children for its excuse and its consecration—­children to whom the Dean of St. Paul’s reveals in their nursery a side of his character wholly and beautifully different from the popular legend.