Painted Windows | Page 3

which is not afraid of recognizing that the Church in the past has often been wrong and has affirmed as fact what is really fiction. Those who belong to it are sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled to yield to the practical necessities of ecclesiastical life, but their influence is greater than their numbers. The danger which would face the Church if they were allowed to have more prominence, is that their plainness of speech would lead to disruption. The danger is a real one, and the leaders of churches do right to fear it.
Over against this is the right wing of Liberals. There is probably little difference in the matter of private opinion between them and the left wing, but they are more concerned with safeguarding the unity of the Church. They endeavour to do this by using the old phraseology with a new meaning, so that, for instance, members of this party feel justified in stating that they accept the creed, though they do not believe in it in the sense which was originally intended. This is technically called "reinterpreting," and by a sufficient amount of "reinterpreting" all the articles of the creed (or indeed anything else) can be given whatever meaning is desired. The statement that God created the heavens and the earth becomes in this way an affirmation of evolution; the Virgin Birth affirms the reality of Christ's human nature; and the Resurrection of the Flesh affirms the Immortality of the Soul. Performed with skill, this dialectical legerdemain is very soothing to a not unduly intelligent congregation and prevents any breach in the apparent continuity of the Church's belief. It also prevents any undue acrimoniousness of theological debate, for debate is difficult if words may be interpreted to mean the opposite of their historical significance. The danger is that the rising generation will refuse to accept this method, and that it will lead to deep and irretrievable intellectual confusion. This is what Father Knox clearly saw to be the intellectual sin of the "Foundationers."
Nevertheless, when all is said it is easy to criticize but difficult to advise. As "A Gentleman with a Duster" has seen, the desire of the church leaders whose portraits he paints is to preserve the Church through a period of transition. I doubt the wisdom of their policy, though I recognize the difficulty of their task and appreciate their motives.
I doubt the wisdom of the policy because I think that though it may satisfy the older members of the Church and so preserve continuity with the past, it is doing so at the expense of the younger generation and sacrificing continuity with the future. It may conciliate those who have power to make trouble in the present; but it is only the young who are now silently abandoning the Church, that have the power to give life in the future. It is always safer to agree with the old, but it is infinitely more important to convince the young; and the reason for the failure which troubles "A Gentleman with a Duster" is that ecclesiastical life in England is failing to convince the young. Is it better here?
CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A., February 5, 1922.

INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
Some of the men whose personalities I attempt to analyse in this volume are known to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think, represent schools of thought in which America is as greatly interested as the people of Europe.
Therefore I may presume to hope that this present volume will find in the United States as many readers as The Mirrors of Downing Street and The Glass of Fashion.
But, in truth, I hope for much more than this.
Perhaps I may be allowed to say that I think America can make a contribution to the matter discussed in these pages which will outrival in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the contribution she has already made to world politics by the inspiration of the Washington Conference.
For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action. Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and ?schylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.
Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus, I feel