When we can convince the public of
this, the opposition of organized religion will soon collapse or become
ineffective." Dean Inge effectively answers those who have objected
to the methods of Birth Control as "immoral" and in contradiction and
inimical to the teachings of Christ. Incidentally he claims that those
who are not blinded by prejudices recognize that "Christianity aims at
saving the soul--the personality, the nature, of man, not his body or
his environment. According to Christianity, a man is saved, not by
what he has, or knows, or does, but by what he is. It treats all the
apparatus of life with a disdain as great as that of the biologist; so
long as a man is inwardly healthy, it cares very little whether he
is rich or poor, learned or simple, and even whether he is happy, or
unhappy. It attaches no importance to quantitative measurements of any
kind. The Christian does not gloat over favorable trade-statistics, nor
congratulate himself on the disparity between the number of births and
deaths. For him... the test of the welfare of a country is the quality
of human beings whom it produces. Quality is everything, quantity is
nothing. And besides this, the Christian conception of a kingdom of God
upon the earth teaches us to turn our eyes to the future, and to think
of the welfare of posterity as a thing which concerns us as much as that
of our own generation. This welfare, as conceived by Christianity, is
of course something different from external prosperity; it is to be the
victory of intrinsic worth and healthiness over all the false ideals and
deep-seated diseases which at present spoil civilization.
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