Christianity is in no more real danger now than it was a hundred and
fifty years ago, when Dean Swift, and many other greater wits than we
have amongst us nowadays, thought and said that it was doomed. We hold
in perfect good faith, that the good news our Lord brought is the best
the world will ever hear; that there has been a revelation in the man
Jesus Christ, of God the Creator of the world as our Father, so that
the humblest and poorest man can know God for all purposes for which
men need to know him in this life, and can have his help in becoming
like him, the business for which they were sent into it: and that there
will be no other revelation, though this one will be, through all time,
unfolding to men more and more of its unspeakable depth, and glory,
and beauty, in external nature, in human society, in individual men.
That, I believe to be a fair statement of the positive religious belief
of average Englishmen, if they had to think it out and to put it in
words; and all who hold it must of course look upon Christ’s gospel
as the great purifying, reforming, redeeming power in the world, and
desire that it shall be free to work in their own country on the most
favorable conditions which can be found for it.