AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY 359
are doing not to serve man^ but only from ambition or covetousness.
Therefore, however magnificent may be the palaces in which you live, the churches in which you officiate and preach, and the vestments in which you adorn yourselves, your occupation is not made better by these things. ' That which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.^
So it is with those who, not believing, continue to preach what is false, and to strengthen men in it.
But there are among you those also — and their number is continually increasing — who, though they see the bankrupt position of the Church creeds in our day, cannot make up their minds to examine them critically. Belief has been so instilled into them in childhood, and is so strongly supported by their environment and by the influence of the crowd, that they (without even trying to free themselves from it) devote all the strength of their minds and education to justify, by cunning allegories and false and confused reasonings, the incompatibilities and contradictions of the creed they profess.
If you belong to this class of clergy, which though less guilty is even more harmful than the class pre- viously mentioned, do not imagine that your reasonings will quiet your conscience or justify you before God. In the depth of your soul you cannot but know that all you can devise and invent will not make the immoral stories of Scripture history — which are nowadays in opposition to man's knowledge and understanding — or the archaic affirmations of the Nicene Creed, either moral, reasonable, clear, or accordant with contempo- rary knowledge and common-sense.
You know that you cannot by your arguments con- vince anyone of the truth of your faith, and that no fresh, grown-up, educated man, not trained from child- hood to your belief, can believe you ; but that such a man will either laugh, or will suppose you to be men- tally afflicted, when he hears your account of the com- mencement of the world, of the first man, of Adam^s
