Dr. Momerie on the Corruption of the Church.

DR. MOMERIE delivered a lecture recently at Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, on "The Corruption of the Church." He had been charged, he said, with taking up a position that was dishonest and dishonourable, and as a heterodox clergyman he had been called in plain English a liar, because he had once assented and consented to everything contained in the Prayer Book. But this was a mistake ; he never subscribed to anything of the kind. No clergyman had made such a declaration since 1865, when an alteration was made, at the instance of Dean Stanley, to meet the difference of opinion among ministers of the Church. His conduct was distinctly, therefore, legal. Atheists had attacked the Church from various points of view, but his object and motive were altogether different from the ground taken up by Atheists. He criticised, not because he was an Atheist, but because he believed in God—not because he was opposed to religion, not because he thought meanly of Christ, but because he thought too much of Christ. He was acting in the interest not only of Christianity, but of the Church itself. The Church was in imminent peril ; there was a canker eating away its very life. The Church was within measurable distance of dissolution. The clergy did not see the danger, but that made it all the worse. Long ago the Church had lost all control over cultured people, and the laity was going uphill just as fast as the clergy were coming down. The laity now thought and read for themselves just in proportion as the clergy lost power to help them. The Church was losing influence, and such an institution could not, except in a spirit of irony, be called a national Church. He was not attacking, as had been said, a figment of his own imagination. He was an expert in orthodoxy, and his parents held all the Church's doctrines in the most rigid and unbending sense. Priests were the gentlemen who originally undertook to square the gods— for a consideration. The orthodox doctrine of the atonement was a survival of the greatest abuses of earliest times, and it was immoral to the core. The doctrine of predestination was also a delusion which must be rejected, as it made God, the most wicked being possible for the human mind to conceive The doctrine of the Trinity was a blundering misconception of the original text. All the ignorant blunders of barbarism were stereotyped in the fundamental doctrines of Christendom. One of these three fundamental doctrines was grossly immoral, and the other two was absolutely ridiculous, and the whole of orthodoxy was incomprehensible. The idea of hell was monstrous, and the Bible was not infallible, for it was full of contradictions. A Church which held this doctrine must be corrupt, and everything corrupt was corrupting ; therefore the Church must have mischievous influence upon human life. Its teachings were intellectually degrading, and were incompatible with the exercise of the mind. It encourages immorality in general and cruelty in particular. The Church was quite out of harmony with modern civilisation, and intellectually and morally it was centuries behind the age. The Church must be reformed from within, or it would be destroyed from without. There must be no tinkering of the creeds, but a radical sweeping away of all delusions. For want of adaptation to its environment the Church was dead.
Nothing else could save it.  —Home News.

 Home News.  18 July 1891,