address delivered before the Eugenics Education Society of London,(4)
William Ralph Inge, the Very Reverend Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral,
London, pointed out that the doctrine of Birth Control was to be
interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity.

"We should be ready to give up all our theories," he asserted, "if
science proved that we were on the wrong lines. And we can understand,
though we profoundly disagree with, those who oppose us on the grounds
of authority.... We know where we are with a man who says, `Birth Control
is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment, war, the physical,
intellectual and moral degeneration of the people, and a high deathrate
to any interference with the universal command to be fruitful and
multiply'; but we have no patience with those who say that we can have
unrestricted and unregulated propagation without those consequences.
It is a great part of our work to press home to the public mind the
alternative that lies before us. Either rational selection must take the
place of the natural selection which the modern State will not allow to
act, or we must go on deteriorating. When we can convince the public of
this, the opposition of organized religion will soon collapse or become
ineffective." Dean Inge effectively answers those who have objected
to the methods of Birth Control as "immoral" and in contradiction and
inimical to the teachings of Christ. Incidentally he claims that those
who are not blinded by prejudices recognize that "Christianity aims at
saving the soul--the personality, the nature, of man, not his body or
his environment. According to Christianity, a man is saved, not by
what he has, or knows, or does, but by what he is. It treats all the
apparatus of life with a disdain as great as that of the biologist; so
long as a man is inwardly healthy, it cares very little whether he
is rich or poor, learned or simple, and even whether he is happy, or
unhappy. It attaches no importance to quantitative measurements of any