AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER. 167 



the saddest spectacle which has been offered to the eyes of Eng- 

 lishmen in this generation. A high court of ecclesiastical juris- 

 diction, with a host of great lawyers in battle array, is and, for 

 Heaven knows how long, will be, occupied with these very ques- 

 tions of " washings of cups and pots and brazen vessels," which the 

 Master, whose professed representatives are rending the Church 

 over these squabbles, had in his mind when, as we are told, he 

 uttered the scathing rebuke : 



"Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written : 

 This people lionoreth me with their lips, 

 But their heart is far from me : 

 But in vain do they worship me, 

 Teaching as their doctriues the precepts of men (Mark vii, 6, 7). 



Men who can be absorbed in bickerings over miserable disputes of 

 this kind can have but little sympathy with the old evangelical 

 doctrine of the " open Bible," or anything but a grave misgiving 

 of the results of diligent reading of the Bible, without the help of 

 ecclesiastical spectacles, by the mass of the people. Greatly to 

 the surprise of many of my friends, I have always advocated the 

 reading of the Bible, and the diffusion of the study of that most 

 remarkable collection of books among the people. Its teachings 

 are so infinitely superior to those of the sects, who are just as 

 busy now as the Pharisees were eighteen hundred years ago, in 

 smothering them under " the precepts of men " ; it is so certain, 

 to my mind, that the Bible contains within itself the refutation 

 of nine tenths of the mixture of sophistical metaphysics and old- 

 world superstition which has been piled round it by the so-called 

 Christians of later times ; it is so clear that the only immediate 

 and ready antidote to the poison which has been mixed with 

 Christianity, to the intoxication and delusion of mankind, lies in 

 copious draughts from the undefiled spring, that I exercise the 

 right and duty of free judgment on the part of every man, 

 mainly for the purpose of inducing other laymen to follow my 

 example. If the New Testament is translated into Zulu by 

 Protestant missionaries, it must be assumed that a Zulu convert 

 is competent to draw from its contents all the truths which it is 

 necessary for him to believe. I trust that I may, without immod- 

 esty, claim to be put on the same footing as the Zulu. 



The most constant reproach which is launched against persons 

 of my way of thinking is, that it is all very well for us to talk 

 about the deductions of scientific thought, but what are the poor 

 and the uneducated to do ? Has it ever occurred to those who talk 

 in this fashion that the creeds and articles of their several confes- 

 sions ; their determination of the exact nature and extent of the 

 teachings of Jesus ; their expositions of the real meaning of that 

 which is written in the Epistles (to leave aside all questions con- 



