Men of intelligence do not go to church nowadays, Mr. Holland announced in that article of his in the Zeit Geist; many women of intelligence refrain from going, he added, though many beautifully dressed women were still frequent attenders.  There was no blinking the fact that the crass stupidity of the Church had made church-going unpopular—­almost impossible—­with intelligent men and women.  The Church insulted the intelligence by trying to reconcile the teachings of Judaism with the teachings of Christianity, when the two were absolutely irreconcilable.  It was the crass stupidity of the Church that had caused it—­for its self-protection, it fancied—­to bitterly oppose every truth that was revealed to man.  The Church had tortured and burned at the stake the great men to whom God had revealed the great facts of nature’s workings—­the motion of the earth and the other planets.  But these facts, being Divine Truth, became accepted by the world in spite of the thumb-screws and the fagots—­the arguments of the Church against Divine Truth.  The list of the Divine Truths which the Church had bitterly opposed was a sickening document.  Geography, Geology, Biology—­the progress of all had, even within recent years, been bitterly opposed by the Church, and yet the self-constituted arbiters between Truth and falsehood had been compelled to eat their own words—­to devour their own denunciations when they found that the Truth was accepted by the intelligence of the people in spite of the anathemas of the Church.

The intelligence of the Church was equal only to the duty of burning witches.  It burned them by the thousand, simply because ancient Judaism had a profound belief in the witch and because a blood-thirsty Jewish murderer-monarch had organized a witch hunt.

And yet with such a record against it—­a record of the murder of innocent men and women who endeavored to promulgate the Divine Truths of nature—­the Church still arrogated to itself the right to lay down a rule of life for intelligent people—­a rule of life founded upon that impossible amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity.  The science of the Church was not equal to the task of amalgamating two such deadly opponents.

Was it any wonder, then, that church-going had become practically obsolete among intelligent men and women? the writer asked.

He then went on to refer to the nature of the existing services of the Church of England.  He dealt only casually with the mockery of the response of the congregation to the reading out of the Fourth Commandment by the priest, when no one in the Church paid the least respect to the Seventh Day.  This was additional proof of the absurdity of the attempted amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity.  But what he dealt most fully with was the indiscriminate selection of what were very properly termed the “Lessons” from the Hebrew Bible.  It was, he said, far from edifying to hear some chapters read out from the lectern