is no other branch of literature so flagrantly inaccurate and unscrupulous. A religious periodical (The Christian World, 20th August 1903), in the course of an editorial on “Candour in the Pulpit” (meaning lack of candour in the pulpit), said: “A foremost modern theologian, by no means of the radical school, has recorded his significant judgment that one of the main characteristics of apologetic literature is its lack of honesty; and no one who has studied theology can doubt that it has suffered more than any other science from equivocal phraseology.” When a journal which has to consult the feelings of a large backward clientele uses this language, we may conclude that the situation is really bad. In fact, not even political journalism betrays such gross carelessness as to the truth of the statements with which it assails its opponents. “The more sacred our ideas are, the more savagely we fight for them,” said Mr. Chesterton, defending the Inquisition. Mr. Chesterton’s own genial method (except that one recognises the taint in his Victorian Age in Literature) disproves his aphorism. There is not the slightest excuse for the gross procedure of religious writers.
I have in various works and articles given hundreds of examples of this procedure, and will be content to deal summarily with two of the chief types of misrepresentation—those relating to history and those relating to science. The classical examples in history are the clerical legends about the morality of the pagans. Here the clerical lie goes on its way
