The English have one sauce. But the number of their religions is as the sands of the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide themselves religiously into two classes—Anglicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, one may say, are reformed Catholics; the Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans. Apparently all English religions—with the exception, of course, of the Catholic religion, which is not counted—date from or since the Reformation. We know what the Reformation means in Scotland, though the English notion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also know in Scotland what religion means. I doubt if the English have any such knowledge. One has only to visit an average[Pg 80] Anglican or Nonconformist church on the Sabbath to perceive that in England religion is under a cloud and has almost ceased to be a spiritual matter. In the first place, you will notice that the congregation is for the most part composed of women and children. Englishmen are too busy or too bored to go to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, what little religious fervour or feeling, they ever possessed has been knocked out of them, and they no longer go to church. And this change has been accomplished, not by the failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free-thought, not by secularists, anti-clericalists, or philosophers, but simply by an indolent clergy on the one hand and cheap railway fares on the other. The mediocre preacher and the new-fangled English week-end have emptied the churches of England\'s manhood. The women and children are left, a puling, bemused crowd, and to these the English shepherds and pastors blate their cheap ritual and read their ill-considered sermons.

It is curious to note how easily an English[Pg 81] parson or Nonconformist minister can make a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let him be just a little more competent than the average, and people flock to hear him. I doubt if there is a really great preacher alive in England to-day. Yet there are three or four who pass for great, and who are supposed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, and Wesley. To give instances would be invidious, but I have no hesitation in asserting that the preachments offered in London at the three or four great churches which are supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule, exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with gauds and mannerisms, packed with trite sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine, inspiration, and value. There are not three bishops on the English bench that can furnish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards to hear. There is not a Nonconformist minister who has a soul above stodginess, convention, and a convenient if threadbare Scriptural tag. The Salvation Army, perhaps, have the fervour and the courage, but[Pg 82] they lack wisdom, and they have no art. The Congregationalists have some of the wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have no fervour. Indeed, wherever you turn you find that the recognised English religionists have given themselves up to a decadent, Hebraic emotion, and let the solid things of the spirit—the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic vision, the Hebraic passion—pass by them.

Gradually the churches of this remarkable country are ceasing to have anything to do with religion at all. "Religion be hanged!" say those that run them. "Religion no longer appeals to the wayward, stony-hearted, over-driven, half-educated English populace. What is wanted is social brightness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood and the full belly; so that we will give magic-lantern entertainments in our churches on the Lord\'s Day, we will go in \'bald-headed\' for pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee and veal-and-ham pies, and screws of tobacco given away at the doors, wrapped up in a tract, which you are at liberty either to read[Pg 83] or to light your pipe with." As for the English priests that had the authority of God, they are no longer sure whether they have that authority or not. Of course, they believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, and private way; but not one of them dare stand up and swear by his powers publicly. The bishops are all for peace and quietness. "If you please, we are your friends, and not your masters," say they to their clergy; and their clergy, to use an English vulgarism, "wink the other eye." And the clergy, too, in turn are the friends and not the masters of common men; they are so much your friends, indeed, that, providing you mount a silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the plate, you can depend upon a friendly shake of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition six days in the week, even though you happen to be a bookmaker or the keeper of a bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, if clergy they may be called, they speak humorously at tea-parties, they enter into hat-trimming competitions at bazaars, and[Pg 84] they play principal guest at the tables of over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man amongst them who can say boo to a goose. There is not a man amongst them who as a social unit is worth the ￡150 a year and a manse, with ￡10 per annum for each child, that a glozing, unintellectual English congregation hands over to him. Out of the ease and security and respectability and dolce far niente which the Church of England provides for a............