Now I am, as I said, not passing any personal opinion on these Christian teachings: I am merely drawing attention to their position in modern life. The uncultivated masses and the body of the clergy who preach to these masses accept the miraculous birth, death, resurrection, and all the rest, quite implicitly. Here and there one finds a preacher who dissents; I am speaking of the mass. At the middle level of mental culture, among both clergy and laity, dissent becomes much more frequent. At the highest level of theological scholarship it would be fair to say that the dissenters are almost, if not quite, as numerous as the believers; and at the higher level of lay culture, where opinions may be more freely formed and expressed, the dissenters are the overwhelming majority. These men may be theists or agnostics or Christians in the broader sense of the word, but the great majority of them do not believe in these distinctively Christian doctrines. Yet the Churches, wherever they are not kept in check by this critical element, invest these doctrines with the most sacred and confident character: stamp them as unquestioned truths on the minds of children and uneducated people, and put them forward as their official and authoritative doctrines. Nay, there is hardly a theologian in any church who does not, when Christmas and Easter annually occur, lend his official and most solemn countenance to these discarded or disputed traditions.
This would not, could not, be done in any branch of lay culture. One may justly insist on one's opinion in any disputed theme, but what would be the attitude of our leaders of culture if any authoritative historian, philosopher, or scientist attempted to impose on the inexpert, as an unquestioned truth, some older opinion which a large proportion of the expert regarded as false or questionable? What would they say to a responsible teacher in one of these branches of lay culture who read certain statements to those who trusted him, and said within his own mind: "This is what people thought a thousand years ago"? A clergyman told me that it was with this mental reservation that he read the creeds and gospels on Sundays. What would a philosopher, or historian, or scientist say, if his department of culture were an organic association with a public and authoritative teaching, and this public teaching contained statements which a large proportion of the leading representatives regarded as false? And what would he say to any colleagues who urged him to allow these things to stand because a change might lessen the respect of the general public for their authority?