more apparent and more sinister aspect in a police state; but it works in less obtrusive ways in our own country. And yet as Mr. Wren Lewis pointed out in his lecture in the Cambridge Divinity School printed in Faith Fact and Fantasy, it was one of Christ's principal aims during his three brief years to debunk this sort of fantasy, or myth, and to bring people down to earth, so that they should stand with their feet on the ground, and speak the truth. Indeed it is one part of his message which has at least in this century largely come true, thanks mainly to the help of the natural scientists. We no longer (either literally or metaphorically) have to sacrifice to the Emperor, in order to remain free.
But the fact remains that the dogmatists are with us still in every walk of life, and seem to thrive and put forth more splendid foliage. Insofar as they exist in the Church (and using the word in the fairly narrow sense in which I have been using it), they are not the disciples of Christ; they are among his worst enemies, because their lives and actions are the contradiction of everything he stood for, however much they may profess to agree with what he said. But then as Bonhoeffer has pointed out, Christianity and Organised Religion are essentially and inevitably in conflict. The former has no rules except love God and your neighbour, and then as Augustine said, “Do as you like”; the latter is inevitably clogged by rules and regulations, including rules of ecclesiastical social precedence which decide whether a minor canon's wife may call the dean's lady by her Christian name, and everything that Trollope describes in Barchester Towers. Not unnaturally Christianity and Organised Religion do not see eye to eye. Indeed I think one may go further than Bonhoeffer. Many agnostics and atheists make the mistake of thinking that the Church is principally a religious institution. It is nothing of the kind. It is principally a secular institution, which is hardly concerned with God's wishes at all.
The Church is hardly concerned with His wishes at all, because its…