12 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



Now follows an astonishing remedial proposition : 

 " We ought to give the people a modified and rational- 

 ised Church, with all the apparatus of symbol, ceremony, 

 music and parochial institution ; and among the parochial 

 activities of the Church I should recognise a systematic 

 effort to encourage the ethical aspect of every political 

 and industrial movement. . . . Religion and the Bible 

 having been rejected on account of their irrational claims 

 to divine origin, must be re-inserted, so to speak, in the 

 secular development of mankind as moral and intellectual 

 factors of high importance." 



Surely we have here the Christian spirit reasserting 

 itself in spite of Rationalism ! Apparently, then, the 

 masses are to be allowed to have the Bible, perhaps 

 after being carefully annotated — whence all the myths, all 

 the miracles, all of Jesus Christ as a myth too, according 

 to Mr. J. M. Robertson, will be carefully excised ! 



But the average man, working or not, is now often 

 quite as well able, and perhaps sometimes much better, 

 than the Secularists, to judge for himself. 



Secularism, with its " coldness " and " want of rever- 

 ence," based on pure Reason and Science, will no more 

 raise the masses, much less the submerged tenth, in the 

 twentieth, than it did in any century B.C. 



" A common complaint against the meetings of Free- 

 thought societies," continues Mr. Gould, " is that they are 

 cold and that they lack reverence." 



Reverence for what or whom, one is inclined to ask ? 

 His reply is. Because they are losing sight of " the vital 

 principle of association " ; the very basis of Christianity 

 or the Brotherhood of Man, 



He is beginning to fear for the masses just as Aristotle 

 did. He suggests " art, literature and education " where- 

 with to raise "the Human ideal to the same level of honour 



