WAVERING FAITH IN CREEDS.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1227, 10 November 1874, Page 3

WAVERING FAITH IN CREEDS.

A contributor to the Contemporary writes as follows :—" Sooner or later tbe thinkers of a people must inoculate and interpenetrate that people with their thought; and the great thinkers of England are not believers. The educated classes, as a whole, are still believers; but the most highly educated have ceased or are ceasing to be so. The tone of conversation; the concessions to free speculation that arc now habitually admitted; the opinions and doctrines that are avowable and allowed, and that it would be deemed intolerance and bad manners to suppress or resent; and the enormous change that has taken place in society and in literature, in these respects, in a single generation, all are indications pointing in the same direction. The change in the tone of controversial writing is another; the advocates of establi died creeds are no longer assailants, but arc co Lent to stand on the defensive—and i cannot always stand. The marked disR inclination which, lam assured, prevails at the universities among the ablest of the undergraduates to enter holy orders may also be referred to as a significant feature. Another very important fact must also be adduced. A very large proportion, probably the majority, of the operative classes in towns arc total unbelievers ; and these are not the reckless and disreputable, but, on the contrary, consist of the best of the skilled workmen, the most instructed and thoughtful as well as the steadiest. The hardheaded, industrious, reading engineers and foremen, the members ot mechanics institutes, the natural leaders of the artisans, are sceptics intellectually, not morally; they disbelieve because they have inquired, argued, and observed, and have been unable to obtain from their Methodist fellow-workmen, or even from ministers of the Gospel, satisfactory answers to their doubts. Among manufacturing artisans and the highest description of citizen laborers, it may be stated, with even more confidence than of the rauks above them in the social scale, that the intellect of the body is already divorced from the prevalent creeds of the country." ■