It
would be difficult to conceive a cruder and more barbarous idea. Attila
did not scourge the Romans, but he did scourge other peoples; and we
hold him up to execration for ever for it. But Archbishop Carr, and many
other preachers, think that an all-holy and all-intelligent God can do
infinitely worse than Attila. He is going to punish the unbelievers in
eternal fire when they die: meantime he will make a hell on earth for
the innocent as well as the supposed guilty, the child and the mother as
well as the free-thinking father. Of a truth, it is not surprising that
a reluctance to listen to sermons has spread to Melbourne, and that men
are wondering whether they had better not take in hand their own
destinies rather than entrust them to such spiritual guides as this.
Note, particularly, in passing the emphasis which the Archbishop puts on
the determination of our generation to control its own destinies. Until
the nineteenth century men entrusted their destinies, on the moral side,
to guides like Archbishop Carr. I have described the result. In the
nineteenth century there began this practice, which the Archbishop
thinks worthy of so inhuman a chastisement, of men attending to their
own moral interests.
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