over-enthusiastic, the unduly devout, are treated (in our Church at least) with suspicion and coolness. The entire tendency of the age is in that direction,-toward toleration bordering on fatuity. Any attack on this amazing idea is "bigotry." Mind you, the idea is not merely that people have a right to believe what they like, but it is that whatever they believe is right! Professor Root, in his splendid Atlantic article, "The Virtue of Intolerance," combats this theory. He says:

"Have I not a right to my own opinion? and if so, mere generosity must accord the same right to my neighbor. It is an interesting case of casuistry, this supposed right to one's own opinion. I suspect that its loudest asserters seldom stop to ask what sort of right they are talking about. If they mean legal right, the answer is simple. The most ruthless minions of the most despotic government cannot keep me from holding what opinion I please, so long as I also hold my tongue; the law can challenge only the utterance of opinion."

"If by 'right' one means not legal but absolute right, as established by abstract Justice in the high court of Truth, the liberty of private judgment is not so wide. One can have no absolute right to any opinion except a true opinion; one can have no right to believe that two and two make five, or even four and a half. In matters of less demonstrable finality, the right to my own opinion presupposes that I have taken into account all the evidence, that I have the requisite skill to sift it and the knowledge to weigh it. Many people go through life without the right to form their own opinion on any matter of more weight than the probable formula of a salad-dressing or a new cocktail-and this latter opinion is now becoming a question of merely scholastic abstraction! The only man with a right to an opinion is the expert; and in any matter that we consider really important, we seek his opinion, and acknowledge its superior worth by paying roundly for it. Sensible people quietly abdicate the right to their own opinion when it is a question of estimating the strain of a cantilever span or of ordering a capital operation. They prefer

to exercise their 'right' only in matters of less serious moment, such as the League of Nations or the immortality of the soul."

The above is profoundly true of the Anglican Church. This inane theory of the world, that one must be tolerant of everything except intolerance, has bitten deep into the mind of the Church. The headmaster of a Church School had rather engage as master a lukewarm Presbyterian than a man whom he suspected of being a "ritualist." One may have that chronic spiritual constipation known as "agnosticism" but one must not believe that the Blessed Sacrament should be adored. Lack of conviction is safe, in other words, but explicit belief is dangerous.

Is the extraordinarily uninspiring aspect of the men who make up the priesthood the cause or result of this attitude? It is difficult to say, but it seems more reasonable to say that they are the result. As long as the clergy are underpaid; as long as they abandon principles to retain their jobs; as long as weak men are elected to high offices because the poor-spirited are afraid of strong men, just so long shall we have the heresy of opportunism flourishing in our front garden for the world to see.

And the saddest part of this uninspired and uninspiring type is that they are treated as the truly wise of the Church. Without red blood enough to teach positively this or that as true and necessary to salvation, they are injecting the virus of vagueness and opportunism into the priesthood and into the Church through the seminaries. Doctrinal teaching which may be taken in two diametrically opposite ways; apologetics which teach that the goal of life is happiness (how, when or where left unexplained), and that prayer is a subjective exercise; exegesis which bends its efforts toward destroying whatever faith in miracles, the virgin

birth and other manifestations of the supernatural the candidate has,—all these and worse are not only tolerated but sanctioned. This may sound extreme. But look at the results, and you must have a suspicion that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. One class of students at a great seminary were taught that one must not accept things simply on the say-so of a person called "Matthew." But because a neurotic German could not believe certain things possible, one must take his (the German's) word that they didn't happen. Perhaps there are a few of us left who do not care to take a German's word for anything. The German mind has shown itself fully capable of wantonly pulling the wings off butterflies-mentally, morally and spiritually. Men from German prison camps tell with a certain deplorable vividness how this trait extended into their physical treatment. But a hundred years from now the lineal descendants of our "higher critics" will not care to accept the report of these eye-witnesses (low-calibre men, many of them, not very well educated) and will be "taking the word" of the latest German explanation of the matter.

It did not require a war to explode for most of us the German theories of politics and religion; however, the war came, and has gone on, and yet a professor in one of our Eastern seminaries advises his more intelligent students to take "a couple of years in Germany"! In God's name, why? To be missionaries? Not a bit of it; to bring back the destructiveness, the foulness, the intolerable conceit of theologians who say "The Evangelists and the Saints and the Church are all wrong-I alone know how it all happened."

As long as seminaries harbor this sort of thing; as long as students are advised not to associate themselves with any

"group," as it may spoil their chances for a rich parish ("don't be extreme" is the slogan); as long as the enthusiastic young militant Christian with a soul on fire for God's cause and a welter of plastic ideas in his head is frowned on and a vague sort of spiritual moron is held up as the ideal,

-just so long will the clergy be merely the insipid reflection of the age in which they live, rather than the leaders of the vanguard of the armies of God. Is your priest as fine a type of man as your doctor? Did it ever occur to you that while your doctor went to a medical school governed by vigilant experts, to be taught what to do by practical instructors, your priest (if he be the rule and not the happy exception) was struggling toward his crystalization of religious thought through a morass of doubts and destructive theories, of unrelated and inconsequent scholarship, of inadequate instruction in the instruments of the Church (the sacraments) and at every turn was assailed by influences which sought to nullify positiveness and substitute vagueness and euphemism and opportunism. Not that over-zealousness and high spirits do not need discipline; on the contrary, they must be properly disciplined in order to teach and lead effectively, but the steel should be fashioned into a tempered blade, not reduced to a puddle of dull metal. Naturally none of our seminaries are wholly bad,—but if they are not the spring-head from which the Church is being infected, one does not know where to look.

We are in the usual state of crisis through which the Church must pass in each phase of the world's history. We failed to justify ourselves in the war, we let slip an opportunity which, please God, will never return. Now, with the world never so turbulent, with the muck and scum of every

harbor stirred up and floating on the surface, we are talking of abandoning principles, of compromise which is not compromise but surrender, and we are keeping as heads and instructors in some of our seminaries the last people in the world to handle any nettle with a strong grip. It is not a new experience for the Church, but, thanks to the present era, we are less able to combat it than before. If the trumpet call of revolt and reform were sounded and heeded, it would mean strong measures; feelings would be hurt; friendships would be broken; and an immense home for indigent doctors in divinity would have to be established. And of course we must not do anything so extreme; no wellbred bishop would dream of advocating anything so upsetting. With our back to the wall, with our creed attacked by those whom we have called "brother," we still but reflect the aenemic spirit of the phase in which we live. Like the undergraduate "rag" pictured in E. F. Benson's "Robin Linnet," where one boy lies on the floor with another boy seated on his stomach preparing to torture him, we cry from our prostrate position, "Whatever we are, let us be dignified. . . . And calm. . . Calm. . And dignified". .

Are we too enmeshed in the meaningless broadmindedness of the day to heed a call to arms? Must we continue to discount zeal and enthusiasm and courage unless it be in the direction of material gain or radically destructive criticism? Have we none of that generosity of spirit which makes us explorers and soldiers and navigators, which sees life, not as a drowsy afternoon in a comfortable room but as a crystal "many-faceted to adventure"?