Realise that you are part of a great orderly and mutually helpful cosmos, that you are not stranded or isolated in a foreign universe, but that you are part of it and closely akin to it; and your sense of sympathy will be enlarged, your power of free communication will be opened, and the heartfelt aspiration and communion and petition that we call prayer will come as easily and as naturally as converse with those human friends and relations whose visible bodily presence gladdens and enriches your present life.

CHAPTER IV

THE ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE OF LAYMEN
TO RELIGION

T

HE average layman of the present day is often accused of being indifferent to religion. But the allegation as worded seems to me untrue, unless by "laymen" is understood the great mass of the people. Even then I doubt if they are indifferent to real religion, or to reality and sincerity and loftymindedness of any kind. No one can be really indifferent to the great problem of existence- the mysteries of life and death and of human destiny. It is doubtful whether people in general can be considered indifferent even to theology, of a sort,-not to problems connected with apparent oppositions between knowledge and faith, for instance, nor to questions of Biblical interpretation and the nature of Inspiration. They are not unopen to the influence of a saintly life, or disposed to treat lightly such fundamental subjects as the existence of Deity and the relations between man and God.

I gather that they are not indifferent in this country to these topics, because they seem always willing to read about them or to discuss them. And if this refers chiefly to the more educated classes, it may be maintained on behalf of the masses that their apparently perennial excitement about what doctrines

shall be taught to small children, though it may lack lucidity, seems to argue anything but indifference.

In Germany and France, so far as I can judge, people in general do not care in the same way to discuss religious questions, and theological magazines are confined to specialists; there is little or nothing of general interest and wide circulation on the subject. In those countries minds seems closed, either in the positive or in the negative direction, as regards religious beliefs. But here it is otherwise, and I have heard it maintained at a discussion society that there was really nothing except religion and politics which was worth the trouble of getting excited about.

Nevertheless there is a sense in which people in this country are indifferent to something allied to religion -at any rate to its outward and visible manifestations. To Ecclesiasticism they are indifferent, and they do not in any great number go to church. I take the allegation which is here being dealt with to intend to ask the question, Why is this? Why have the outward and visible forms of religion lost hold of both educated and uneducated people?

1

I believe that over-pressure is one answer-a general sense of the shortness of life and the immense amount there is to be done in it. This holds true whether the press of occupation is caused by the demands of pleasure, or of business, or of investigation,

1 I say "lost" hold, because I suppose I may assume, from the churches which they erected, as well as from the example of truly Roman Catholic countries at the present day, that, in say the twelfth century, observance of the outward forms of religion once really had a firm grasp of the majority of Englishmen.