Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/253

 of God as speech, and to kill one's intellectual aspiration in order, as some bigots would advise, to serve God more completely is the rankest blasphemy. The wilful refusal to use a great gift merely insults the Giver.

It is by obstinately declining to watch the branching-out, as it were, of the great tree of Christianity in forms which are not narrow or limited, but spacious and far-reaching, that the clergy have in a great measure lost much that they should have retained. Society has slipped altogether from their hold. Society sees for itself that too many clerics are either blatant or timorous. Some of them bully; others crawl. Some are all softness to the wealthy; all harshness to the poor. Others, again, devote themselves to the poor entirely, and neglect the wealthy, who are quite as much, if not more, in need of a "soul cure" as the most forlorn Lazarus that ever lay in the dust of the road of life. None of them seem able to cope with the great dark wave of infidelity and atheism which has swept over the modern world stealthily, but overwhelmingly, sucking many a struggling soul down into the depths of suicidal despair. And Society, making up its mind that it is neither edified nor entertained by going to church on Sunday, stays away, and turns Sunday generally to other uses. It is not particular as to what these uses are, provided they prove amusing. The old-fashioned notion of a "day of rest" or a "good" Sunday can be set aside with the church and the clergyman; the one desirable object of existence is "not to be bored." The spectre of "boredom" is always gliding in at every modern function, like the ghost