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the Church who endeavour to follow
Jesus, but do not call him Lord, as there are within the church who
reverse this attitude. For good or for evil (and I think it is for evil), the
Church, especially the Church of England, seems to have decided that
to say "Lord, Lord" is the pass-word to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Equally important with this great change in thought, which has
abandoned the infallible trinity of Church, Bible, and Jesus, is the fact
that the best of our generation have shifted the centre of endeavour
from the future salvation of the individual to the present reformation of
this world for the benefit of coming humanity. The best men of our
time are troubling very little about the salvation of their own souls; not
because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe
that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not a
supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They

have relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of
forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look
forward is progressive and educational, not fixed or punitive. Moreover,
most of them would say, with complete reverence, that the work which
is set before them by the Purpose of Life, as they understand it, is to
make a better world, materially, morally, and intellectually, as an
inheritance for children who are yet unborn. They are not much
disturbed if they are told that they are not Christians, for they are
supremely indifferent to names.
Nevertheless their presence in the world today is the concrete problem
to be faced by Liberal Churchmen. To consistent Catholics such as
Father Knox it is not, I suppose, a problem at all. He would say that
such men deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but
they are not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a
faith once delivered to the saints," Father Knox is right; such men are
not Christians, but, if so, the fact that they are not is the death warrant
of the Church, for they represent progress to a higher type than that of
the Christianity of the past.
But the liberal Christian does not accept the view that the Church ought
to exist for the preservation of traditional opinions. In his heart he feels
that such men would have been accepted by Jesus as his disciples, and
therefore he believes that the Church can and ought to be reformed so
as to make room for them. For this Reformation he has no fixed and
rigid programme, but there are three things which he thinks the Church
must provide.
The first necessity is the right understanding of life. It cannot be given
by any theory of the universe which, like the biblical one, is in glaring
contradiction to the facts of modern science[1]. Nor is it conceivable
that belief can be fixed so as to be unalterable. Intellectual correctness
is relative, and Truth cannot be petrified into Creeds, but lives by
discussion, criticism, correction, and growth.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Bryan is right in maintaining that evolution and the
whole scientific concept of life is unbiblical, though wrong in thinking
that that settles the question.]
The second necessity is the purification of the human spirit. Generation
after generation of Christians on their way through the world have
endeavoured to follow the moral teaching of the Church, but the

friction and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities,
the swell of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire,
which a mere appeal to reason cannot remedy because it condemns but
does not remove the evil. In the future as in the past, the Church must
find means to satisfy men's need and desire for purification.
The third is closely allied to the second. It is "the helping hand of
grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does
not understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the
depths, the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown.
The origin and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological
problem; its existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience
shows that though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact
normally work through them.
These are the three things which the Liberal wishes to keep in the
Church. He knows that to do this the traditional forms of church life
require great changes, but he wishes to preserve the institutional life of
the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that Christians
who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments, the
thoughts, practices, and ordinances of the past, have the right in