Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/193

 earlier, had been repudiating it altogether; and if church-going, Sabbath-keeping and other formal acts of religion continued to be mentioned by the clergy and their adherents as the subject of lamentable negligence, the habits thus deplored arose, less and less from conviction and more and more from taste. People stayed away from church not because they rejected Christianity but because church-going bored them. If the clergy saw their congregations dwindle they had themselves to thank for it. The atrocious dulness of nearly all sermons drove away more churchmen than were lured from their pews by militant irreligion. There is not the smallest reason to believe that "free thought" propaganda had any really important part in producing the indifference denounced by the churches. The simple fact is that a growing appetite for amusements, athletic and other, and an intolerance of the boredom inflicted by preachers too indolent or too imperfectly educated to make their discourses tolerable by an active mind, robbed the churches of their visitors. A good preacher never lacked a crowded congregation even in the middle of a weekday in the city of London; nor are such congregations lacking now.

No doubt the form of education generally adopted in non-Catholic countries has been a great cause of indifferentism. The fostering of