baker's shop with a German name over the door should be pillaged.
Their verdict was, in effect, "Serve God right, for creating the
Germans!" The incident would have been impossible in a country
where the Church was as powerful as the Church of England, had it
had at the same time a spark of catholic as distinguished from
tribal religion in it. As it is, the thing occurred; and as far
as I have observed, the only people who gasped were the
Freethinkers. Thus we see that even among men who make a
profession of religion the great majority are as Martian as the
majority of their congregations. The average clergyman is an
official who makes his living by christening babies, marrying
adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he can (when he
has any conscience about it) of a certain routine of school
superintendence, district visiting, and organization of
almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christianity at any
point except the point of the tongue. The exceptional or
religious clergyman may be an ardent Pauline salvationist, in
which case his more cultivated parishioners dislike him, and say
that he ought to have joined the Methodists. Or he may be an
artist expressing religious emotion without intellectual
definition by means of poetry, music, vestments and architecture,
also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as
fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist.
Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine,
or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy
Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an
expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are
manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or
actual parents, in which case he is strongly suspected by the
straiter Salvationists of being little better than an Atheist.