It is
like saying, "I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker."
If a man says, "I am not a Trinitarian," I understand. But if he says
(as a lady once said to me), "I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual
sense," I go away dazed. In what other sense could one believe in the
Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of progressive
religious views is full of baffling observations of that kind. What can
people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin?
What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it?
Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that
science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did
they think that immortality was a gas?
Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle
into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the
world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from
the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things;
it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and
loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you
like. That is Atheism if you like.
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