PLEA FOR A SIMPLER FAITH CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY In IN medicine there is a privileged class of teachers and practitioners, and a protest from within may have more effect than many attacks from the outside, of which, especially in recent years, there has been no end. In theology it is different. this country the only rag of privilege remaining to the clergy of the Established Churches, and the main benefit got from their connection with the State-besides a moderate endowment and free buildings-is, that it is supposed to give them a higher social standing than is held by A their brethren of the Voluntary Churches. Instead of one system of education, carried out at different schools, but all regulated by a General Council as in medicine, each religious sect has its own school, regulated by itself, and amenable only to the common. law; and any new sect is free to start a school of its own, if only it can find the needful means. But although there is thus free trade in the teaching of theology in the gross, there is none in the individual churches. Each has its own educational mill, into which youths must enter, mostly at an age when they can have no means of knowing any form of belief except what their parents have held and have taught them. The parents naturally send their sons to the school or college where their own tenets are taught, and if any youth ventures-which is rare-to think for himself, he is liable to be dismissed, and he has to look out for some other mode of gaining a livelihood. If at a later period he is settled in life and has perhaps a young family dependent on him, the difficulties in acting on doubts, should these then come upon him, are so appalling that he may well be excused from allowing them to enter into his thoughts at all. If it is difficult, therefore, for a clergyman. who thinks for himself to risk the consequences of his opinions so far as concerns. his own position and that of his family, how much more difficult must it be for him to attack the foundations of belief on which all other so-called Christian churches stand as well as his own? And how much easier it is for him, in his intercourse-public and private with his people, to avoid all allusions to the doctrines on which he has changed his mind, and to teach only the personal and social duties founded on the system of morals common to all Christians and to the best of what we stigmatise as heathen communities. It may seem presumption in a layman to attempt to enlighten his generation as to its belief. A long life of active and varied professional education and work, and now a long period of repose, have given the present writer advantages over most of his colleagues in reviewing the changes in the medical world during the last half century, and in drawing some practical conclusions, at variance with the prevailing ideas, as to the prevention and cure of disease. I can pretend to no such advantages in venturing to write on the religious questions of the day. But it may be that an outsider is more free to think for himself than is an official Christian teacher; and I may add that the freeing myself from the decided and extreme religious dogmas, which I believed simply because they were those with which I was brought up, cost me much more time and much more thought than were needed to free me from the doctrines which I learned from my teachers in the medical schools. |