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Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality by Harold Begbie
page 6 of 197 (03%)
endeavoured to follow the moral teaching of the Church, but the friction
and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities, the swell
of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire, which a
mere appeal to reason cannot remedy because it condemns but does not
remove the evil. In the future as in the past, the Church must find
means to satisfy men's need and desire for purification.

The third is closely allied to the second. It is "the helping hand of
grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not
understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths,
the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin
and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its
existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that
though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact normally
work through them.

These are the three things which the Liberal wishes to keep in the
Church. He knows that to do this the traditional forms of church life
require great changes, but he wishes to preserve the institutional life
of the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that
Christians who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments,
the thoughts, practices, and ordinances of the past, have the right in
another generation to change these. The continuity of the Church is in
membership, not in documents.

But the Liberals fall into two groups. There is the left wing which
expresses itself with clearness and decision, which is not afraid of
recognizing that the Church in the past has often been wrong and has
affirmed as fact what is really fiction. Those who belong to it are
sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled
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