Most of the thinkers who have been examined in the last twenty-three chapters, like most of those who were examined in volumes I and II of Religion and Public Doctrine, have produced a public doctrine which has left its mark not only on many generations of the educated but also on many generations of epigoni who have reproduced, often crudely and bluntly, the assumptions which these thinkers had established in the public mind.

In establishing assumptions, many of the latitudinarians who appear in chapters 1–15 of this volume had an insinuating conviction of superiority based on the belief that they had thought out their positions for themselves, had by-passed the stock responses which make sincerity impossible and had avoided the dependent status which distinguishes the epigoni we shall be examining in this chapter from the heroes of the mind we have been examining hitherto.

The difference in quality and tone between epigoni and heroes of the mind is as fundamental among latitudinarians as among those whom they claim to replace, and it is painful to consider the mindless vacuity of Edna Lyall, the author of We Too, who subscribed to Bradlaugh's election expenses in Northampton on the ‘Christian’ ground that ‘noble atheists’ were a witness to ‘something greater than themselves’; the eclectic crudeness of the fourth Earl Grey – an Anglican and Governor-General of Canada – who identified Christianity with both the religion of humanity and a ‘secular … national’ Church which would number Darwin, Rhodes, Mazzini and the elder Toynbee among its heroes; or the Reverend R. J. Campbell, ex-Methodist, Congregationalist minister of the Temple Church in London and future follower of Bishop Gore, whose famous course of sermons, The New Theology, designated ‘creed’ and ‘dogma’ as threats and ‘the divine immanence in the universe and … mankind’ as evidence of spiritual religion.