Prayer-book; and I need not say that a believer in nonmiraculous Christianity by no means occupies a position of such dissent as this.
The only obstacle therefore for a scrupulous minister will be in the services of the Church and in the reading of the Bible: and here I admit that there is a very considerable obstacle, though it appears to me to be less than it was a dozen years ago, and each year lessens it still further. The difficulty lies, not in the scepticism of the minister (who may be a more faithful worshipper of Christ than any one in his flock) nor in any congregational suspicion or alarm (for his advanced views lie quite beyond the horizon of the thoughts of any country congregation, and any but an exceptional congregation elsewhere) but almost entirely in the minister's own uneasy sense of a difference between himself and his people; in his fear that he may be acting hypocritically; in his consequent loss of self-respect; and in a resulting demoralization affecting all his work.
Clearly this is a difficulty which would be diminished, if not altogether removed, by publicity; but as long as it is not publicly recognized that widely different interpretations of the Scripture are possible and compatible with the worship of Christ, the difficulty is a very serious one. Whenever such a man reads the Bible in the discharge of his public duty, he is liable to be haunted with the consciousness that he is two-faced. He conveys to his congregation an obvious meaning and they assume that he accepts that meaning himself; but he does not. Suppose, for example, he reads the story of the battle of Bethhoron: his congregation believes that it is listening to the most stupendous miracle that the world has witnessed; the minister believes that he is reading an account of one of the twenty, or more, decisive battles of history. Similarly, in the New Testament, if he reads the narrative of
