"Much of what we call religion," he said, "is only the superstition of the past; much of what we call science is but the superstition of the present." He pleaded that religion might be an ever-living growth in the human heart, not a dead formulary of dogmatic origin.

True, organisation was necessary, but in the realm of spiritual essentials a creed drawn up in the fourth century should not be treated as if it were the final expression of the religious consciousness _in secula seculorum_.

One should, indeed, be prepared for the perpetual restatement of religious truth, fearlessly submitting the most cherished convictions to the light of each succeeding age.
Yet, especially, should it not be forgotten in an age of ultra-physicism, of social and economic heterodoxies, that there must ever be in human society, according to the blessed ordinance of God, princes and subjects, masters and proletariat, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians--yet all united in the bonds of love to help one another attain their moral welfare on earth and their last end in heaven;--all united in the bonds of fraternal good-will, independent yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.
He closed with these words of Voltaire: "We must love our country whatever injustice we suffer in it, as we must love and serve the Supreme Being, notwithstanding the superstitions and fanaticism which so often dishonour His worship." The sermon was no marked achievement in coherence, but neither was Browett a coherent personality.

It was, however, a swift, vivid sermon--a short and a busy one, with a reason for each of its parts, incoherent though the parts were.

For Browett was a cynic doubter of his own faith; at once an admirer of Voltaire and a believer in the Established Order of Things; despising a radical and a conservative equally, but, hating more than either, a clumsy compromiser.