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If Christianity proves anything it is that you can destroy error, but that truth is essentially eternal and immortal. And for this reason you can no more construct" the truth than you can destroy it. The most man can do is to discover truth, to set it free, to break down the man-built barriers which prevent it from being spread abroad.

This was the purpose of those who contributed to Faith or Fear?"-of which the present book is a sequel. That book did indeed receive a welcome, especially in the secular Press, which astonished its writers, although, very naturally, certain clerical reviewers, defending their traditional position, attacked it on the ground of its supposed destructiveness of the Catholic Faith.

This criticism on their part was inevitable, and certainly it was not unexpected; but there was another sense in which, as used by some of our more friendly critics, it had more justification. The object of our book was rather to plead for a fresh temper and attitude in the Church than to set forth a positive restatement or re-interpretation of the faith.

For this reason it was natural that certain critics should ask in effect whether we could tell them explicitly what are the fundamental principles underlying our appeal, and give at all events some outline of the way in which, on those principles, we should now express our own faith in Christ.

One critic in particular-the writer of a most thoughtful review in The Westminster Gazette-said that we did not attempt to deal with the fundamental problems of the average modern man. What is required to

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meet the case," he affirmed, "is less a new theology than a new philosophy of religion. Thinking man needs some account of the nature of God and His relation to the Universe which is not avowedly self-stultifying according to rational tests; some facing of the problems of evil which does not take refuge in a pious hope that it is somehow good, some elucidation of the hope of human survival which is not merely an appeal to faith or personal conviction. For good or evil, the fact has to be faced that thousands of men and women are now for the first time in their lives seething with these problems, and that the ecclesiastical method of assuming them all to be easy, simple and long ago settled by authority fills them with impatience. A Church which is to minister to these people and to give them the spiritual religion for which they crave must have among its teachers, philosophers, thinkers, men of insight and daring, with a mission to the Gentiles who are in difficulty about the presuppositions of religion."

There is profound truth in these words, and it is a truth which there is special need for the Church and its leaders to face. For, unfortunately, there is a strong tendency apparent in the Church just now to think that the clergy can leave ultimate problems alone and concentrate upon social and ecclesiastical reform. The recent Lenten Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Bourne seems to show that the latest policy of the Roman Catholic Church is to put social reconstruction in the forefront of its programme, in the hope that a progressive policy in this direction may disguise the fundamentally reactionary attitude of the Papacy on

all purely theological no less than on all philosophical, scientific, and political questions. The same tendency is noticeable in our own Church. Even The Challenge, which is acknowledged to be the most courageous and open-minded of the Church of England weekly papers, and is always ready to defend the comprehensiveness of the Church of England against those who would attack it, occasionally adopts the attitude that we may regard fundamental questions of thought as already settled, or comfortably settling themselves, in the orthodox direction, and go on to deal with practical matters, such as the Life and Liberty movement within the Church, and Social Reform without.

No one who has read "Faith or Fear? -no one who reads this book-will, I hope, accuse me or my colleagues of indifference to these practical questions. Our whole philosophy is one of movement and progress. We are deeply anxious for social reform, and some of us, at all events, are equally anxious for the Church to reform itself in such external matters as the better administration of its revenues, the introduction of a more democratic method of government, and the revision of its services. But we are convinced that if the Church is to be, as it should be, primarily religious, it needs in the first place to revise its theology and rethink its philosophy. There are some folk who frankly take the line that the average Englishman despises thought, and that therefore the Church need not bother about its intellectual statements. What men want, they say, is to be told plainly exactly what they have got to believe. They are perfectly willing to accept a plain statement of traditional Catholic doctrine, they

do not want to be puzzled about problems of thought, and so forth.

We believe this attitude to be ultimately as fatal to the life of the Church as it is cynical and faithless. It is, of course, true that owing to the inefficiency of our educational systems-both elementary and secondary-there are vast numbers of men who have never been encouraged to use their minds. It is equally true that a large number of Englishmen are intellectually slothful. But for all that we agree with the writer in The Westminster Gazette that there never was a time when more people were thinking hard about the most fundamental problems. And the Church which shows no interest in the movement of thought will certainly sooner or later find that it is powerless to win men. They will not assent to obsolete statements of doctrine for the sake of gaining the support of the Church in matters of social reform.

But, it may be said,-it often is said by the clergy -the battle is already won. All the intellectual bogeys have been laid. Science has become humble and no longer professes a deterministic creed, against which Christianity must needs enter the lists. We have escaped from the bondage of the Victorian age into the glorious liberty of the Chestertonian era. Because the reality of freedom has been demonstrated by modern philosophy we may believe anything we choose to believe without let or hindrance. Anything may have happened in the past, anything may happen in the future. There is good literary warrant for the belief that a pumpkin was once turned into a coach and four. The notable tradition that on another

occasion a cat developed unusual musical powers, a cow performed equally unusual athletic feats, and a dish and spoon eloped together, has been firmly held by many generations of children. Science cannot assert that any of these things are impossible. It is not for science to say what is possible or impossible. A childlike faith will accept without question these ancient traditions, and assert that everything did happen just as it is recorded to have happened, in this "world of loose ends" where anything may happen at any moment.

On this theory, we need never be surprised if we go into our garden and pick a cabbage leaf to find that we can make an apple-pie of it. For we are living in the Great Panjandrum's world, if only we would recognise it. So we are free to accept without question whatever is preached to us in the name of the Church. It is as unscientific as it is impious to express doubts about recorded miracles. To do so is to show oneself hopelessly out of date-and so on and so forth.

Now, whatever else is to be said about this theological libertinism, this at least is certain, that it is merely a violent reaction from determinism and is almost equally far from the truth. And this being so, whatever its temporary success among those of the clergy and the literary laity who are of a type of mind to which all science is a sealed book, it can only provoke another reaction in its turn. We have but to look abroad at the present day to see how fatally easy it is to discredit freedom in freedom's name.

The plain truth is that the whole thought of mankind has been transformed by the great increase of scientific