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Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality by Harold Begbie
page 4 of 197 (02%)
is true, but they do not believe that it is true because it is his
teaching. It is therefore impossible today for educated men, even among
those who most sincerely adopt it, to settle a moral argument by an
appeal to the teaching of Jesus. The tragedy is that there are probably
as many today outside the Church who endeavour to follow Jesus, but do
not call him Lord, as there are within the church who reverse this
attitude. For good or for evil (and I think it is for evil), the Church,
especially the Church of England, seems to have decided that to say
"Lord, Lord" is the pass-word to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Equally important with this great change in thought, which has abandoned
the infallible trinity of Church, Bible, and Jesus, is the fact that the
best of our generation have shifted the centre of endeavour from the
future salvation of the individual to the present reformation of this
world for the benefit of coming humanity. The best men of our time are
troubling very little about the salvation of their own souls; not
because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe
that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not
a supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They have
relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of
forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look
forward is progressive and educational, not fixed or punitive. Moreover,
most of them would say, with complete reverence, that the work which is
set before them by the Purpose of Life, as they understand it, is to
make a better world, materially, morally, and intellectually, as an
inheritance for children who are yet unborn. They are not much disturbed
if they are told that they are not Christians, for they are supremely
indifferent to names.

Nevertheless their presence in the world today is the concrete problem
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