“We should be ready to give up all our theories,” he asserted, “if science proved that we were on the wrong lines.  And we can understand, though we profoundly disagree with, those who oppose us on the grounds of authority....  We know where we are with a man who says, `Birth Control is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment, war, the physical, intellectual and moral degeneration of the people, and a high deathrate to any interference with the universal command to be fruitful and multiply’; but we have no patience with those who say that we can have unrestricted and unregulated propagation without those consequences.  It is a great part of our work to press home to the public mind the alternative that lies before us.  Either rational selection must take the place of the natural selection which the modern State will not allow to act, or we must go on deteriorating.  When we can convince the public of this, the opposition of organized religion will soon collapse or become ineffective.”  Dean Inge effectively answers those who have objected to the methods of Birth Control as “immoral” and in contradiction and inimical to the teachings of Christ.  Incidentally he claims that those who are not blinded by prejudices recognize that “Christianity aims at saving the soul—­the personality, the nature, of man, not his body or his environment.  According to Christianity, a man is saved, not by what he has, or knows, or does, but by what he is.  It treats all the apparatus of life with a disdain as great as that of the biologist; so long as a man is inwardly healthy, it cares very little whether he is rich or poor, learned or simple, and even whether he is happy, or unhappy.  It attaches no importance to quantitative measurements of any kind.  The Christian does not gloat over favorable trade-statistics, nor congratulate himself on the disparity between the number of births and deaths.  For him... the test of the welfare of a country is the quality of human beings whom it produces.  Quality is everything, quantity is nothing.  And besides this, the Christian conception of a kingdom of God upon the earth teaches us to turn our eyes to the future, and to think of the welfare of posterity as a thing which concerns us as much as that of our own generation.  This welfare, as conceived by Christianity, is of course something different from external prosperity; it is to be the victory of intrinsic worth and healthiness over all the false ideals and deep-seated diseases which at present spoil civilization.”

“It is not political religion with which I am concerned,” Dean Inge explained, “but the convictions of really religious persons; and I do not think that we need despair of converting them to our views.”