Of a truth, it is not surprising that a reluctance to listen to sermons has spread to Melbourne, and that men are wondering whether they had better not take in hand their own destinies rather than entrust them to such spiritual guides as this.
Note, particularly, in passing the emphasis which the Archbishop puts on the determination of our generation to control its own destinies. Until the nineteenth century men entrusted their destinies, on the moral side, to guides like Archbishop Carr. I have described the result. In the nineteenth century there began this practice, which the Archbishop thinks worthy of so inhuman a chastisement, of men attending to their own moral interests. Of this also I have described the result. The moral sentiment of Europe has greatly improved, and there is at least a widespread revolt against warfare and a prospect of abolishing it. For this God, the more than human, scorched Europe with the horrible flames which Archbishop Carr thinks he keeps in his arsenal of torture-implements. The Archbishop says that infidelity has not spread so much in Australia. I should, if I were not well acquainted with the Commonwealth, be disposed to see in that the reason why eminent prelates can still utter such gross medieval nonsense in that country.
In England this particularly crude type of nonsense is not usually uttered by preachers of distinction,[1] though it is common enough among less responsible preachers; but there is a dangerous approach to it in some of the sermons which the religious periodicals
- ↑ As I write, the Press describes Canon Green of Burnley as saying that "the war is a divine judgment on the world—England for the last ten years has been God-forgetting, drunken, immoral."
