Note 41 — Chapter XI

It is difficult on any other supposition to account for the marked fact that hardly any of our English rationalists have criticised Christianity, except as presented to them in a form essentially Protestant; and that a large proportion of their criticisms are solely applicable to this. It is amusing, too, to observe how, to men of often such really wide minds, all theological authority is represented by the various social types of contemporary Anglican or dissenting dignitaries. Men such as Professors Huxley and Clifford, Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, can find no representatives of dogmatism but in bishops, deans, curates, Presbyterian ministers—and, above all, curates. The one mouthpiece of the Ecclesia docens is for them the parish pulpit; and the more ignorant be its occupant the more representative do they think his utterances. Whilst Mr. Matthew Arnold apparently thinks the whole cause of revealed religion stands and falls with the vagaries of the present Bishop of Gloucester.