Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/14

traditional dogmas—dogmas that have preoccupied the human race for so many centuries—would of necessity have their curious interest. But this re-interpreting of these traditions in terms of the most transitory of all modern fashions would present itself to his mind as something ill-gendered and teasing.

If Christianity developed, as Newman once thought it did; it surely developed—so our visitor would remind himself as he turned away from the pink church—along its own intrinsic lines; "moving altogether if it moved at all," and not bouncing up and down like a child's balloon!

But suppose the whole idea of religious emotion were involved in its not changing; not changing even by slow evolutionary progress, but remaining the one quiet, dignified human tradition that retained for us the calm refuge of an antiquity "old as the hills"?

Being the sceptic he is and brought up—let us suppose—in the Anglican Faith, these considerations would not necessarily drive this good man post-haste into the nearest edifice that acknowledged the Pope; but they would at least make him understand how it is that almost every Roman Church, in every city in the world, is an unconscious hostelry of the past, where unaggressive unbelievers, going in and going out, are per-