"...it has long been the sport of the market-place...to deride the cross for not discharging the functions of the weather-cock"

What Sir Harry and his Humanists have to show is not that they are free from what they regard as delusions altogether distant and dead, but that they are free from the characteristic delusions of their own day. And they are so very far from being free of them, they are so strangely duped even by the worst of them, that we are not at all disposed to apologize for thinking the myths of the Middle Ages a better training for the mind. 

What shocks them in what they call Shillitottery is, I fancy, the fact that the Christian side is no longer on the defensive. In the spiritual city of which they are citizens, it has long been the sport of the market-place to throw stones and cat-calls at the church and steeple; and especially to deride the cross for not discharging the functions of the weather-cock. But of late there has come a voice from the silent steeple, perhaps from the bell which is its ancient tongue; it is somewhat husky at present; but it seems to be saying to the market something a little like this: 'You say that I am decayed, that I am superstitious, that I am hypocritical. But what about you? What about the idols of the market-place and the impostures of the mart? If you think our legends are lies, at least they are not daily lies, like those you turn out in your daily papers. You fancy we confess that our creeds are illogical; but at least we do not boast that they are illogical as your lawyers do about their constitutions and their courts. You think our saints are insanely idolized for their virtues; but at least they are not idolized for their vices, as are the capitalists and commercial magnates whom you flatter and adore. You say that our influence has declined; yes, indeed, our influence has declined; and he who looks long and clearly, across your labyrinth of sewers and gutters, will realize how much.'

-"The Mythology of the Moderns", The New Witness
(reprinted in The Living Age, volume 299, October, November, December 1918)