You don't have a soul...

[ChadwickHenryWard]

61. I tried reading that book.

I didn't get any further than his definition of "mere Christianity." He was limiting himself to those notions that are held in common between Catholics and Anglicans. If all he's willing to defend are those beliefs that are held by a majority of Englishmen as uncontested and uncontroversial, how can his work have the intellectual rigor to convince nonbelievers? How can somebody in America, let alone some far-flung place like Papua New Guinea, possibly accept such hopelessly provincial arguments?

To me, what really discredits him is the fact that he was an atheist in his youth. He had all of human religious experience, past and present, to choose from, and one day he just realized that the religion that happened to be the established faith at the time and place of his birth was the right one. What are the odds?