The Inside of the Cup | Page 5

was invented by man to appeal to man's
superstition and weakness. Of the remainder--who can say?"

"What," asked Mrs. Waring, "do they say about the Apostolic
Succession?"
"Mother is as bad as the rest of us," said Eleanor.
"Isn't she, grandfather?"
"If I had a house to rent," said Mr. Bridges, when the laughter had
subsided, "I shouldn't advertise five bath rooms when there were only
two, or electricity when there was only gas. I should be afraid my
tenants might find it out, and lose a certain amount of confidence in me.
But the orthodox churches are running just such a risk to-day, and if
any person who contemplates entering these churches doesn't examine
the premises first, he refrains at his own cost.
"The situation in the early Christian Church is now a matter of history,
and he who runs may read. The first churches, like those of Corinth and
Ephesus and Rome, were democracies: no such thing as a priestly line
to carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of. It
may be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the
mind of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another
hierarchy, which then existed in Israel. The Apostles were no more
bishops than was John the Baptist, but preachers who travelled from
place to place, like Paul. The congregations, at Rome and elsewhere,
elected their own 'presbyteri, episcopoi' or overseers. It is, to say the
least, doubtful, and it certainly cannot be proved historically, that Peter
ever was in Rome."
"The professor ought to have a pulpit of his own," said Phil.
There was a silence. And then Evelyn, who had been eating quantities
of hothouse grapes, spoke up.
"So far as I can see, the dilemma in which our generation finds itself is
this,--we want to know what there is in Christianity that we can lay
hold of. We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our
education contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon. We
don't know where to turn. We have the choice of going to people like

George, who know a great deal and don't believe anything, or to
clergymen like Mr. Hodder, who demand that we shall violate the
reason in us which has been so carefully trained."
"Upon my word, I think you've put it rather well, Evelyn," said Eleanor,
admiringly.
"In spite of personalities," added Mr. Bridges.
"I don't see the use of fussing about it," proclaimed Laureston Grey,
who was the richest and sprucest of the three sons-in-law. "Why can't
we let well enough alone?"
"Because it isn't well enough," Evelyn replied. "I want the real thing or
nothing. I go to church once a month, to please mother. It doesn't do me
any good. And I don't see what good it does you and Lucy to go every
Sunday. You never think of it when you're out at dinners and dances
during the week. And besides," she added, with the arrogance of
modern youth, "you and Lucy are both intellectually lazy."
"I like that from you, Evelyn," her sister flared up.
"You never read anything except the sporting columns and the annual
rules of tennis and golf and polo."
"Must everything be reduced to terms?" Mrs. Waring gently lamented.
"Why can't we, as Laury suggests, just continue to trust?"
"They are the more fortunate, perhaps, who can, mother," George
Bridges answered, with more of feeling in his voice than he was wont
to show. "Unhappily, truth does not come that way. If Roger Bacon and
Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Harvey and the others had "just
trusted," the world's knowledge would still remain as stationary as it
was during the thousand-odd years the hierarchy of the Church was
supreme, when theology was history, philosophy, and science rolled
into one. If God had not meant man to know something of his origin
differing from the account in Genesis, he would not have given us
Darwin and his successors. Practically every great discovery since the

Revival we owe to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced
into opposition to the tremendous power of the Church, which always
insisted that people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of
cosmogony and Greek philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism,
Judaic sacerdotalism, and temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt
out by this same Church as the last word on science, philosophy,
history, metaphysics, and government."
"Stop!" cried Eleanor. "You make me dizzy."
"Nearly all the pioneers to whom we owe our age of comparative
enlightenment were heretics," George persisted. "And if they could
have been headed off, or burned, most of us would still be living in
mud caves at the foot of the cliff on which stood the