1 The old gods pass' the cry goes round, 
 1 Lot how their temples strew the ground ' ; 
 Nor mark we where, on new-_fledged wings, 
 Faith, like the phoenix, soars and sings.
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 Fourth Thousand 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Afajesty
 
 ! '?' 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF r * T T FORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 To A. E. FLETCHER, ESQ. 
 
 Y dear Mr. Fletcher, Some one has 
 said that the true pulpit of these 
 latter days is the newspaper press. You 
 have been one of the first journalists to apply 
 this dictum. You have realised that even 
 poor ' average humanity ' cares for something 
 beyond race-meetings, murders, divorce cases, 
 and scandals in high life; that a new book, 
 or a new development of thought, may hope 
 to rival even these breathless interests j that 
 the press should appeal to the higher as 
 well as the lower instincts j and in conse- 
 quence you have virtually been the founder 
 of a great newspaper. Some time ago, you 
 gave me the opportunity of raising an im- 
 portant question to me the most important 
 of questions as to whether Christianity was 
 really so obsolete to-day as its opponents 
 glibly assume. 
 
 We have nowadays to put up with a 
 good deal in the way of sacrilege, but I 
 could not stand by and see the sublime figure 
 of Christ vulgarised to make an Adelphi 
 holiday, and, as no more competent Eighth 
 
 DEDICA- 
 TION
 
 VI 
 
 Cfje Religion of 
 
 DEDICA- 
 TION 
 
 Champion of Christendom appeared to be 
 forthcoming, I ventured to play David to 
 Mr. BucJtanarts Philistine. You obligingly 
 allowed me the use of your battlefield for 
 the occasion. Thence sprung the following 
 pages though, as a matter of fact, there is 
 not, I think, a single phrase in them repro- 
 duced from my ' Daily Chronicle 1 letters 
 and, therefore, it will hardly seem inappro- 
 priate that I should wish to associate your 
 name with a book which owes so much to 
 your sympathy. I have condensed in its 
 pages much religious experience, and long 
 and ardent thought on spiritual matters 
 which have ever had for me the deepest 
 fascination. If I have said a true word for 
 the cause of true religion, I ask nothing 
 better. If I have missed saying it on this 
 occasion, I shall persevere in the hope of 
 saying it on some other. 
 
 At all events, I hope you will accept this 
 ' Religio Scriptoris ' as a token of my grati- 
 tude for your many kindnesses, and believe 
 me 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Richard Le Gallienne. 
 
 Mulberry Cottage, New Brentford, 
 z6tfi October 1893.
 
 a Literarp 
 
 VI 1 
 
 CON- 
 TENTS 
 
 THE CONTENTS 
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 The ' Minor Poet ' on Religion I Professional 
 Rivals The Churchman and the Scientist : 
 Spiritualists and Materialists: A Medi- 
 tation on Rook-pie: The Spiritual Sense: 
 Religion a System of Symbolism: Science 
 also deals -with Symbols: Average Church- 
 man and Average Scientist one and the 
 same : Concerning Vegetarianism : ' Caveat 
 lector ' t Schismatics : The Literary Man of 
 the Period Pages i-io 
 
 II 
 
 THE RELATIVE SPIRIT 
 
 Modern Advantages in Discussion of Religion : 
 A Writer but the Representative of a Tem- 
 perament: Forgotten Heresies: Old-time 
 Terminus The Inspiration of the Bible: 
 Miracles: 'One' (commercial) 'traveller 
 returns' : Concerning Documents: Blessed 
 Divorce of Theology and Religion : The 
 Relative Spirit: Limits of its Jurisdic- 
 tion : Polygamy and Monogamy . , . 10-17 
 
 III 
 
 WHAT IS SIN? 
 
 What is Truth? the Question of the Past: 
 What is Sin ? the Question for the Present:- 
 Mr. Pater's ' Marius, the Epicurean ': Have
 
 Vlll 
 
 Religion of 
 
 CON- 
 TENTS 
 
 we a Lower and a Higher Nature f Old Sins 
 become New Duties: A tentative definition 
 of Sin Pages 17-22 
 
 IV 
 WHAT IS PAIN? 
 
 Original Sin : The Mystery of Joy : The Ques- 
 tion stated too much in terms of our own 
 existence: Concerning the use throughout of 
 the word ' God ' : Pain a Process : The Sen- 
 timental Spectator : Pain contemplated too 
 much in the bulk : Mistaken Pity : Hinton 
 on Pain : ' In Itself I an impossible Con- 
 ception : The Discipline of Pain : The 
 Sufferer the Real Authority: The Minis- 
 try of Pain : Mr. George Meredith : Mr. 
 Coventry Patmore : Browning: Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer : Schopenhauer and Spinoza : All 
 Theories Relative: The Question at its worst: 
 Pessimism-^ Cowardice and Selfishness: An 
 Age of Cowardice ..... 22-35 
 
 FREE-WILL 
 
 A Postulate: Conditions of the Will: The 
 'Clockwork' Objection: Will Batteries: 
 Matters outside our Will: What have we 
 to live for f The Egotism of Man : Humility 
 the key to many mysteries : ' To the praise 
 and glory of God ' : The world still Ptole- 
 maist in practice, though Copernican in 
 theory : Life a free boon : ' Counting our 
 mercies': The loss of 'free-will' really a 
 
 36-44 
 
 VI 
 
 THE HEREAFTER 
 
 Familiar notions on the subject : Do we really 
 care about immortality ? A theory of friend- 
 ship : The fallacy of ' Personality ' : The
 
 a Ltterarp 
 
 IX 
 
 alleged preciousness of ' Personality ' : The 
 Wastefulness of Death : Life not necessarily 
 futile: Omar Khayyam: 'Irreparable loss' 
 of a Learned Man : The Hereafter as Com- 
 pensation : The Braver View : Mr. John 
 Davidson's ' Fleet Street Eclogues ' : The 
 Hereafter a belief for the Happy rather 
 than the Unhappy : ' The Garden of Proser- 
 pine' Pages 44-55 
 
 CON- 
 TENTS 
 
 VII 
 
 ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 'Is Christianity played out?' Christ and the 
 Life to Come: Christianity pre-eminently a 
 religion for this world: Is Christianity on 
 the wane ? The power of Christianity largely 
 in its composite character : The Humanity 
 as well as Spirituality of Christ's teaching: 
 Truth inevitably soiled in its transmission 
 through the hands of Apostles and Priests : 
 Catholicism : Concerning Priests : The 
 Tragedy of the Idealist: Ibsen's 'Brand' : 
 The Paradox of Christian History : The 
 History of Christianity and the Teaching of 
 Christ not to be confused: The world has 
 never tried the Gospel of Christ : Early per- 
 version of the Christian ideal : The world 
 was not ready for Christianity : Material 
 preoccupations : The spiritual significance of 
 Copernicus : The true perspective of Life : A 
 simile of man : The complex is always 
 obvious, it is the simple that is mysterious : 
 The world more ready for Christianity : 
 Christ the one authority on the Christian 
 Ideal: Christ misinterpreted: Giles Fletcher' s 
 ' Christ s Triumph after Death ' : The true 
 Christian . . .... 55-73
 
 X 
 
 Cfce EcUffion of 
 
 CON- 
 
 
 TENTS 
 
 
 
 VIII 
 
 
 DOGMA AND SYMBOLISM 
 
 
 The soul of good in Christian dogma : The 
 
 
 Word God and its alternatives: Mr, Pat- 
 
 
 more' s ' Religio Poetae ' : The Reality of 
 
 
 ' Conversion ' : The Mother and Child : 
 
 
 Grace : Faith and Works : Prayer : ' Natu- 
 
 
 ral ' Prayer : The Limitations of Christian 
 
 
 Symbolism : Pan and Christ have both a 
 
 
 place in the human Pantheon : The Religion 
 
 
 of the Future : Mr. Norman Gale's ' A 
 
 
 Country Muse ' . Pages 73-83 
 
 
 IX 
 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SENSES 
 
 
 ' Natural ' Religious Senses : The Spiritual 
 
 
 Sense : ' Simple People ' : The Sense of 
 
 
 Wonder : The Sense of Beauty : Its Degra- 
 
 
 dation in 'Decadent' Art: 'Decadence' 
 
 
 mainly a disregard of proportion : Limited 
 
 
 Definitions of the Sense of Beauty : Beauty 
 
 
 more than Form and Colour: Men and 
 
 
 Women imply more than Form and Colour : 
 
 
 Art subject to greater laws than its own : 
 
 
 The Sense of Pity often deadened by the Sense 
 
 
 of Beauty : Why should I live for others ? 
 
 
 Unselfishness an inherent condition of Society: 
 
 
 The birth of an ideal: The Sense of Hum- 
 
 
 our : The ' New Humour ' : Proportion the 
 
 
 vital principle of Humour : The proper 
 
 
 limits of Humour : Humour the parent of 
 
 
 humility : The tears of Humour : The 
 
 
 Selfishness, Misery, and Tragedy of Life 
 
 
 largely due to a Lack of Humour : The Sense 
 
 
 

 
 a Ltterarp 
 
 XI 
 
 CON- 
 TENTS 
 
 POSTSCRIPT 
 
 George Borrow and the Dog-fighter: The 
 Evangel of the Demi-monde and the Music- 
 hall : The Dream of the Decadent : Lombroso 
 on ' the Man of Genius ' : ' Modern doubt ' 
 largely a newspaper scare : The Census of 
 the Happy: Intellectual pride: Our debt 
 to modern science : The Biologist or the 
 Poet? The 'Root' Fallacy the Creative 
 ' Miracle ' : Where Science ends Religion 
 and Poetry begin: The Anthropologist's 
 ' explanation ' of Religion : Renan on Re- 
 ligion : The ' raison d'etre ' of the Religious 
 Instinct : The Sanctity of Life : The Re- 
 ligion of the Spirit : Joachim de Lyra : Re- 
 ligion the most ancient of the Sciences : Our 
 vast debt to the Past: Our most distinc- 
 tively ' modern ' ideas : Evolution : Demo- 
 cracy : Art: Literature: Religion: The 
 cry for a ' Message' . . . Pages 102-118
 
 CJje Religion of a Literat? 
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 IN spite of valiant exemplars to 
 the contrary, we would seem to 
 insist more and more that the writer, 
 like the tailor, is but the ninth part 
 of a man ; and that one of those poor 
 literary infusoria, 'the minor poets,' 
 should have his speculations on the 
 greater issues of life, that he should, 
 like the Hottentot, have his ' idea of 
 a Supreme Being,' is matter for 
 boundless astonishment. Many in- 
 deed would seem to find the idea 
 hugely amusing. To what a fall in 
 the general estimation of poetry does 
 this point. 
 
 TWO classes of objectors meet 
 the layman on the threshold 
 of a religious inquiry such as I 
 am about to undertake : the profes- 
 sionals of two rival doctrines, the 
 Churchman and the Man of Science. 
 
 The 'minor 
 poet ' on 
 religion 1 
 
 Professional 
 
 rivals : the 
 
 Churchman 
 
 and the 
 
 Scientist.
 
 Religion of 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 Spiritualists 
 
 and 
 Materialists 
 
 Each insists that the subject is his 
 inviolable property ; and in proof 
 one brings his Bible, and the other 
 a hermetically sealed tube contain- 
 ing protoplasm. Well, I must be 
 content to be the scorn of both. 
 Yet I must guard myself against 
 misconception as to my use of those 
 terms ' Churchman ' and ' Man of 
 Science/ for, indeed, there are two 
 very different types of each. Pro- 
 bably they are ultimately distin- 
 guished by this: that for one type 
 the puzzle of the world is entirely 
 set at rest by his Bible and his 
 protoplasm (if it can be said to 
 have been a puzzle at all to one 
 who is so easily satisfied), while 
 for the other his Bible and his pro- 
 toplasm are but symbols of a mystery 
 which they focus, but are far from 
 explaining. In short, the world is 
 divided into natural spiritualists and 
 materialists. For the materialists 
 the concrete facts of existence are 
 alone important, indeed they have no 
 glimpse of any other, no conception of 
 aught they cannot touch and handle, 
 eat, or see through a microscope ;
 
 a Literarp 
 
 the spiritualists, on the contrary, 
 are almost in danger of neglecting 
 those concrete facts, so impressed 
 are they by the transfiguring mys- 
 teries of which to their eyes they 
 seem but the transitory symbols. 
 To one the world is opaque, shut 
 within the walls of form and colour ; 
 to the other it is mystically trans- 
 parent, palpitating with occult signi- 
 ficance. 
 
 AS I write, they are shooting rooks 
 in an avenue outside my garden. 
 The boys of the village are there in 
 great force. Just now I sauntered 
 down amongst them, and there in a 
 little black heap at the foot of a tree 
 was ' the bag.' I took up one of the 
 poor dead cawers. It was still shud- 
 deringly warm. I took up another 
 and another, and noticed that the 
 heads of each were missing. ' Oh, 
 that was to prevent them tasting 
 bitter ! ' said my neighbour. And 
 then I realised that the one signifi- 
 cance of these poor dead things was 
 ' rook-pie '! Up went the ugly gleam- 
 ing tube. Bang ! In an instant came 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 A 
 
 Meditation 
 on Rook- 
 pie.
 
 Cfje Religion of 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 the sound of a body toppling through 
 the branches, and another young 
 rook was on its way to rook-pie. In 
 a twinkling one of the urchins seized 
 hold of him, and had nonchalantly 
 wrenched away his head and cast it 
 in the grass within half a minute of 
 his final caw up among the green 
 boughs. Well, I know it is morbid 
 sensibility. I know I ought to take a 
 manly delight in slaying my feathered 
 fellow-creatures. All the same, I 
 could not get the thought out of my 
 head that half a minute before that 
 rook had been sailing and cawing in 
 the evening sunlight, and that before 
 you could say ' Caw ! ' it was a poor 
 lifeless lump of feathers, with its head 
 off. Ludicrous as it may seem, here 
 was the mystery of life and death 
 sickeningly bare. Here were two 
 sharply- contrasted points of view 
 brought one against the other. 
 ' That makes the twentieth ! ' grimly 
 smiled the man of the steel tube, 
 already looking about for the twenty- 
 first. Yes, which of those stormily 
 circling above there was to be the 
 twenty-first? Which had destiny
 
 a Literarp span 
 
 already marked with the mark of 
 death, the corvine Valkyrior already 
 chosen for rook-pie ? There was 
 another mystery to my ridiculous 
 sensibility, and, not feeling equal to 
 awaiting its solution, I came back to 
 my desk. Before I had taken up my 
 pen came the bark of the gun, and I 
 knew that the fatal choice had been 
 made. 
 
 What has all this to do with re- 
 ligion? Much. For one temperament 
 the world means terrible and beauti- 
 ful mysteries for another it simply 
 means 'rook-pie.' For the mariner 
 the stars, so eloquent to the lover, 
 are but celestial signposts, set there, 
 forsooth, to pilot his poor voyage ; 
 for the farmer the mysterious beauty 
 of the seasons means but 'weather' 
 and ' crops ' ; for the undertaker 
 death means just coffins. 
 
 world then is unmistakably 
 -L and sharply divided into those 
 who have what we may call the 
 Spiritual Sense, and those who have 
 it not. It is obvious that the large 
 majority of mankind belong to the 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 The 
 
 Spiritual 
 Sense.
 
 f)e Religion of 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 Religion a 
 
 system of 
 
 Symbolism. 
 
 Science 
 also deals 
 
 with 
 symbols. 
 
 latter class. The churches are full 
 of them, for, properly speaking, 
 'religion' as conventionally under- 
 stood makes more materialists than 
 science. Organised religion is but a 
 form of more or less arbitrary sym- 
 bolism. For some few the symbolism 
 is alive : is, as we said, transparent, 
 and radiant with the occult signifi- 
 cance for which it stands. For the 
 majority it is as opaque as the rest 
 of their daily interests, nor, owing to 
 their temperaments, could it ever have 
 been otherwise. (And here we may 
 remark, in passing, on the anomaly 
 of a religion so essentially transcen- 
 dental as that of Christianity being 
 the authorised religion of so consider- 
 able a proportion of the earth's popu- 
 lation. Of course, it has only become 
 so by a materialisation common to 
 all religions a materialisation which 
 makes one as valuable or as valueless 
 as another.) Now, science as well as 
 religion deals with symbols, for there 
 is no single fact of life, no existence 
 in nature, which, truly seen, is not 
 symbolic. But how often does your 
 average scientist realise this? In
 
 a Literary 
 
 his carefully-stored observations he 
 fondly sees explanations ; though, 
 of course, the truer scientist only 
 sees in them ever new centres of 
 wonder, new revelations of the un- 
 knowable, that baffle still more than 
 they reveal. 
 
 / "~T" N HE average churchman and the 
 -L average scientist are, therefore, 
 on the same plane of an unmysterious 
 'rook-pie,' sleep-and-eat existence; 
 and the only possible broad division 
 of men from the standpoint of 
 religion is into spiritualists and 
 materialists. In making this dis- 
 tinction, of course, we must not 
 forget that the mere necessity of 
 existence forces us all to be in some 
 measure materialistic. The spiritual 
 insight is mercifully intermittent at 
 meal times, for example. How should 
 we fare if cows and sheep were always 
 to appeal to us as forms of symbolism, 
 so that the roast lamb cried from the 
 dish like the blood of Abel. The 
 vegetarian is a man who is thus 
 perpetually haunted by the symbolic 
 nature of flesh-meat. And yet his 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 Average 
 churchman 
 and average 
 scientist one 
 
 and the 
 same. 
 
 Concerning 
 vegetarian- 
 ism.
 
 Eeitgion of 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 restriction to vegetable forms is ob- 
 viously illogical. If it be the brother- 
 hood of life that the vegetarian sup- 
 poses himself to be regarding, is not 
 the cabbage also a fellow-creature, and 
 why slay the innocent asparagus in 
 its succulent green youth ? Is it not 
 simply that, in the case of vegetables, 
 the vegetarian can ' murder ' without 
 a shock to his nerves, and in the 
 case of animals he cannot ? The plant 
 may be said to die a natural, and the 
 animal a violent, death. In one case 
 the gore, the butcher's knife, and the 
 pathetic pleading eye of the poor 
 victim, do not appal the imagination. 
 Green blood instead of red, and no 
 moans (unless one dines off mandra- 
 gora), that seems the only difference. 
 The precious spikenard of life is 
 spilled in each case alike, and the 
 ' murder ' is in each case unavoidable. 
 Life, like an Eastern queen, imperi- 
 ously demands death, and she must 
 have it. 
 
 We are all, I resume, of neces- 
 sity more or less materialistic, but 
 some of us contain as well a certain 
 leaven of spirituality, while some
 
 a Literarp 
 
 of us seem to contain none at 
 all. 
 
 Whatever appeal the following 
 nai've reflections on great matters 
 may have to any, it will be to the 
 person leavened with that modicum 
 of spirituality : let us call him, for 
 short, the spiritualist. Other per- 
 sons are hereby warned against a 
 sure sacrifice of their lives, a wilful 
 suicide of their time. 
 
 BUT, unfortunately, ' the spiritual- 
 ist ' is divided among number- 
 less small schisms ; and I must, for 
 certain, miscarry with many, simply 
 because I do not subscribe to that 
 particular form of symbolism which 
 they confuse with essential religion. 
 The Wesleyan, the Baptist, the 
 Anglican, the Catholic save in that 
 sympathetic part of him which is free 
 of his creed will have none of me. 
 By another very different type I 
 shall be no less rejected the typical 
 literary man of the period, who sips 
 his absinthe (with a charmingly boyish 
 sense of sin), and reads Huysmans. 
 To discuss such antiquated matters 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 Caveat 
 lector ! 
 
 Schisma- 
 tics. 
 
 The literary 
 
 man of the 
 
 period.
 
 IO 
 
 f>e Eeligion of 
 
 PRELIM- 
 INARIES 
 
 as God, Love, and Duty, when one 
 
 might be wrangling over Degas, 
 
 or grappling with a sonnet by 
 
 Mallarme" ! 
 
 Modern 
 Advantages 
 in discus- 
 sion of 
 Religion. 
 
 A Writer 
 but the 
 representa- 
 tive of a 
 tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 II 
 
 THE RELATIVE SPIRIT 
 
 BUT in spite of the survival, not 
 to say the flourishing existence, 
 of sects and schisms, we have to-day 
 a considerable advantage over our 
 fathers in approaching this question 
 of Religion. We are in the position 
 to assume gaily much that they could 
 only hold by dying for ; though, of 
 course, this can only be assumed in 
 presence of a given audience. The 
 world is no more of one opinion 
 to-day than it ever was or is ever 
 likely to be. Every book is there- 
 fore dependent for readers on a certain 
 limited section of society ; no writer 
 can be more than the representative 
 of a certain temperament. I said that 
 the appeal of these pages will in the 
 first instance be to ' spiritualists ' (the
 
 a Literary 
 
 reader has, of course, understood that 
 by that term I do not mean table- 
 rappers or any other unauthorised 
 limiters of its meaning) ; in the second 
 place, then, it will be to those who, 
 in Carlyle's phrase, have ' swallowed 
 formulae ' after all, a very large 
 class to-day ; a class which realises 
 that, while creeds are temporal, re- 
 ligion is eternal. To that other class, 
 however, which has also ' swallowed ' 
 religion itself, and looks upon the very 
 word as obsolete, my poor words must 
 seem but as old wives' tales. 
 
 w 
 
 E are permitted to smile now 
 at questions which were liter- 
 ally burning to our ancestors, such 
 gracious heresies, for instance, as 
 those which so ' plunged and gravelled ' 
 the soul of Sir Thomas Browne : ' that 
 the soul might in some sort perish 
 and rise again with the body,' ' that 
 all men should finally be saved,' 
 or ' that we might pray for the 
 dead.' But these, says the gloss, ' he 
 suffered not to grow into heresies.' 
 Such terrible heresies as these no 
 longer affright us. We believe them 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 Forgotten 
 heresies.
 
 12 
 
 Cbe Beligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 or leave them as we list, though there 
 are few of us, I imagine, who do not, 
 in different terms, hold the possible 
 salvation of the whole race of man, 
 and who do not sometimes, when the 
 world is budding and shooting in the 
 spring, pray softly in our own way 
 for the souls of those beloved who 
 are no longer with us in the sun and 
 the sweet air. 
 
 Old-time 
 terminus : 
 The In- 
 spiration of 
 the Bible. 
 
 Miracles. 
 
 most vital point at which 
 JL religious controversy formerly 
 ever arrived was the Inspiration of the 
 Bible. But that difficulty has passed. 
 We now either accept or reject the 
 inspiration of a hundred Bibles, and 
 the question is no longer of the in- 
 spiration of one book, but of the in- 
 spiration of the human soul, which 
 has dictated all books. Once the 
 question was of miracles, but now 
 we see that the authenticity of this 
 or that isolated miracle is of little 
 account in a world which is itself 
 one glorious unfathomable miracle. 
 ' Now for my life,' again to quote Sir 
 Thomas Browne, 'it is a miracle of 
 thirty years, which to relate were not
 
 a Literacy 
 
 a History, but a piece of Poetry, and 
 would sound to common ears like 
 a Fable.' A certain editor, com- 
 menting on this passage, remarks : 
 'Yet its actual incidents justify no 
 such description ' ! This editor seems 
 to me the type of man who asks for 
 a miracle, in the ordinary sense of the 
 word, an aberration from the usual 
 course of Nature, a sign, a wonder, 
 as if we had not about us far more 
 wonders already than we have time 
 to realise. Who that has ever been 
 young, that has lived light in the 
 spring, can fail to understand what 
 Sir Thomas Browne meant by his 
 miracle of thirty years ? It was to 
 those who cannot that Christ refused 
 a sign. If the world with all its 
 myriad wonders will not touch them, 
 if through the veils of all its so trans- 
 parent forms they cannot see the 
 face of God flashing neither will 
 they believe though one rose from 
 the dead. To-morrow his resurrec- 
 tion would be as commonplace as 
 the telephone, and enterprising firms 
 would be interviewing him with an eye 
 to branch establishments in Hades. 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 ' One ' (com- 
 mercial) 
 ' traveller 
 returns.'
 
 Cjje Beligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 Concerning 
 Documents. 
 
 Blessed 
 Divorce of 
 Theology 
 
 and 
 Religion. 
 
 The 
 
 Relative 
 Spirit. 
 
 The Trinity, the Atonement, In- 
 fant Baptism, Baptismal Regenera- 
 tion, the Immortality of the Soul, the 
 Life Hereafter these and many other 
 dogmas are now seen to be matters of 
 symbolism or personal intuition. 
 
 IT is no longer necessary for us 
 to dispute painfully concerning 
 documents. All such matters the 
 German commentators and M. Renan 
 have already settled for us, and faith 
 has really nothing either to hope or 
 fear from the discovery of any num- 
 ber of gospels. In short, we have 
 accomplished the inestimable separa- 
 tion of theology and religion. Our 
 religion no longer stands or falls by 
 the Hebrew Bible. 
 
 THERE can be no doubt that we 
 largely owe this immense gain 
 to science and the scientific method of 
 study: not because science has proved 
 or disproved this or that for it can 
 prove or disprove nothing that is ulti- 
 mate but because it has familiarised 
 us with that philosophical instrument 
 of inquiry, the Relative Spirit. By
 
 a JLiterarp 
 
 its aid matters which were once re- 
 garded as final, customs and opinions 
 over which many a human heart has 
 been broken, are now seen to be 
 merely relative to certain conditions, 
 as fashions in dress, and peculiarities 
 in national manners are relative. Be- 
 coming more and more of a law unto 
 ourselves, we pretend less to be a law 
 unto others. Before the breath of that 
 genial spirit the icy conventions and 
 prejudices of mankind melt away as 
 frost in the sun, and the liberated 
 souls of men and women laugh and 
 are glad in the joyous developments 
 of their natures as God made them. 
 
 BUT and here we approach the 
 centre let us not forget, what 
 indeed the Relative Spirit would 
 itself teach us, that its jurisdiction 
 ends at a certain point. It carries 
 us too far if it causes us to imagine 
 that there is nothing absolute in life, 
 nothing which is not, after all, a matter 
 of opinion. Indeed its operation, like 
 all philosophic processes, is entirely 
 among forms and formulae it cannot 
 dissolve the essences of things. Be- 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 Limits of 
 its Jurisdic- 
 tion.
 
 i6 
 
 C6e Religion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 Polygamy 
 and Mono- 
 gamy. 
 
 neath every convention there is a vital 
 principle over which it has no sway. 
 
 FOR example : it is our indolent 
 custom here to wed but one 
 wife. In Turkey our custom is 
 the exception, and there it is more 
 usual to wed four. Religion hallows, 
 shall we say, 'the union,' morality 
 countenances it, and it might be 
 held that Nature itself is on its 
 side. Now, are we to condemn that 
 polygamous Turk as irreligious or 
 immoral ? It is probable he is both, 
 but not necessarily because he has 
 four wives and we only one. What 
 we have to realise is that we may be 
 more irreligious and immoral with 
 our one than he with his four. 
 
 The Relative Spirit working in 
 some might therefrom deduce that 
 chastity of living is a mere casual 
 condition. Morals, we have been 
 told, are matters of geography. But 
 that would be a superficial deduction. 
 The question is of essential chastity 
 of life. You may say, very properly, 
 that it might be harder for a man 
 to be spiritually minded with four
 
 a Literary 
 
 wives than with one, that monogamy 
 is a higher ideal of relationship be- 
 tween men and women. This one 
 admits ; but the question is whether, 
 relative to his conditions, his matri- 
 monial complexities, that Turk does 
 or does not struggle to follow the law 
 of his higher nature. And that is the 
 question which it is the business of 
 the Relative Spirit always to raise. 
 It is our guide as to what is only 
 of provincial and what of universal 
 importance in any particular custom 
 or law. It is the ruling of the 
 Supreme Courts as compared 
 with that of a Justice 
 of the Peace. 
 
 THE RE- 
 LATIVE 
 SPIRIT 
 
 III 
 
 WHAT IS SIN? 
 
 IN dealing with this Relative Spirit, 
 I have practically answered, so 
 far as I am able, one of the few 
 ultimate questions which that spirit 
 leaves us to settle. The question for 
 our forefathers was Pilate's question 
 
 What is 
 
 Truth? the 
 
 question of 
 
 the Past.
 
 iReligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 
 SIN? 
 
 What is 
 
 Sin ? the 
 
 question for 
 
 the Present. 
 
 Mr. Pater's 
 ' Marius, 
 
 the Epicu- 
 rean.' 
 
 What is Truth ? That we may be 
 said to have answered relatively. 
 We might say that truth is the best 
 possible condition in a given set of 
 circumstances. Relatively speaking, 
 we have answered it ; ultimately 
 speaking, we have given it up. 
 
 BUT the vital question of the 
 modern world is What is Sin ? 
 So many acts our fathers have con- 
 demned are seen to be not essentially, 
 but only relatively, evil. Their char- 
 acter is changing with changing 
 conditions. Is all ' sin ' thus relative, 
 or is there such a thing as essential 
 sin? You may remember how, in 
 Mr. Walter Pater's beautiful psycho- 
 logical romance of Marius, the Epicu- 
 rean, the young philosopher, watching 
 the calm demeanour of Marcus 
 Aurelius at those cruel games which 
 the wise emperor endured because 
 they were inevitable, shrank with 
 horror from that cold acquiescence. 
 Not for him so complete a triumph 
 of the Relative Spirit as that. 
 
 ' Surely,' exclaimed his soul, 'Surely 
 evil was a real thing ; and the wise
 
 a iliterarp 
 
 man wanting in the sense of it, where 
 not to have been, by instinctive 
 election, on the right side was to 
 have failed in life.' That is how 
 Marius answered our question, a ques- 
 tion which a man must more or less 
 answer for himself: 'What is Sin?' 
 
 THE answer to it necessitates 
 another question : Have I, or 
 have I not, a lower and a higher 
 nature ? If yes, must I live in accord- 
 ance with the promptings of my 
 lower or my higher? That, as I 
 conceive it, is the one vital question 
 of Religion. Morality answers it for 
 us in some measure. Man has long 
 seen that a harmonious social exist- 
 ence is impossible on the lines of the 
 lower nature. On the coarser appe- 
 tites of that morality has, therefore, 
 set a curb. Though a part answer, 
 it is a suggestive one. The law of 
 the higher life thus prescribed by the 
 merely gregarious instinct of man, 
 followed for the sake of our fellow- 
 men, is soon seen to be lovely and 
 pleasant in the following for its 
 own sake ; and so from a necessary 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 SIN? 
 
 Have we a 
 
 Lower and 
 
 a Higher 
 
 Nature'
 
 2O 
 
 Cfje Eeligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 SIN? 
 
 condition of social intercourse flashes 
 the intuition that such living has a 
 higher sanction and end : That not 
 only should we live righteously for 
 the sake of our neighbour, but for 
 the sake of that spark of God which 
 we feel ever brightening within us. 
 
 WHAT then is Sin? Is it 
 the breaking of the Mosaic 
 Decalogue? Is it the disregarding 
 of conventional moralities ? Or is it 
 something less, and something more ? 
 In frankly answering this question 
 we shall yet need for some time to 
 come to observe certain reticences 
 out of regard to the sensibilities of 
 our neighbours. But we can consult 
 such sensibilities too much, and truth 
 is well rid of ' the weaker brethren.' 
 
 T TNDER the dispensation that is 
 LJ quickly passing many perfectly 
 religious exercises of natural function 
 were condemned as evil : the desire 
 of joy, the delight of affinities, the 
 satisfaction of vital needs. 
 
 The Relative Spirit, however, has 
 taught us that these are not sins but
 
 a Literary 
 
 21 
 
 only may be under certain circum- 
 stances; indeed it will sometimes hap- 
 pen that what were once sins under the 
 old regime become duties under the 
 new one. Unduly ' refined,' idealistic, 
 ansemic persons, for example, are all 
 the better for a dip in good gross 
 earth, a plunge in the Demiurgus 
 cup ; for the lower nature needs 
 nutriment just as much as the higher, 
 and it is no less misleading to treat 
 man as all angel than it is to treat 
 him as all beast. Certain tempera- 
 ments are to be trusted with any 
 measure of such nutriment, others 
 with scarcely any at all. Each man 
 must judge for himself. 
 
 Indeed the question What is Sin ? 
 must in every case be answered in 
 accordance with the relations in- 
 volved, and the necessities of the 
 particular temperament : that is, by 
 the due consideration of our duty 
 to our neighbours, and our duty to 
 ourselves which are, however, both 
 at bottom one duty. 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 SIN? 
 
 Old Sins 
 become 
 
 New 
 Duties.
 
 22 
 
 C6e Eeligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 
 SIN? 
 
 A tentative 
 
 definition 
 
 of Sin. 
 
 Original 
 Sin. 
 
 GENERALLY stated, i would 
 
 \JT define sin as that which in 
 any time, or country, or under what- 
 soever conditions or outward appear- 
 ances, means the living by the lower 
 instead of the higher side of our 
 natures. We cannot tell what that 
 higher side ultimately signifies, any 
 more than we can tell what that 
 lower signifies. We only know that 
 one is higher and one is lower and 
 that it is the evident intention of 
 nature that we should live 
 according to the higher. 
 
 IV 
 WHAT IS PAIN? 
 
 BUT, it may be said, I have really 
 begged the question, eluded 
 the problem, which is not so much 
 of Relative Sin, as of Original Sin 
 in other words the immemorial pro- 
 blem of the meaning of evil, the
 
 a Literary 
 
 mystery of pain, the crux of theo- 
 logy, the darkest mystery of life. 
 Actually the mystery of joy no less 
 eludes us, but we are content to 
 leave that, because it squares with 
 our optimistic theories of the uni- 
 verse. We explain it relatively 
 by saying that God is love. But 
 pain, obviously, militates against such 
 theories, and raises the eternal ques- 
 tion, thus expressed by Mansel and 
 quoted by Mr. Herbert Spencer: 
 ' How is the existence of evil com- 
 patible with that of an infinitely per- 
 fect Being ; for if he wills it, he is 
 not infinitely good ; and if he wills 
 it not, his will is thwarted and his 
 sphere of action limited.' 
 
 ONE of those child's questions 
 so unanswerable ! As a pre- 
 liminary, we can only say that no 
 question whatever that is not relative 
 is answerable. Ultimate pain and 
 ultimate joy are alike inscrutable. 
 Doubtless the problem of pain arises 
 mainly from our limited anthropo- 
 morphic conceptions of God, the 
 First Cause, the Unknowable. We 
 
 WHAT is 
 PAIN? 
 
 The 
 
 Mystery 
 of Joy.
 
 Eeligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 The Ques- 
 tion stated 
 too much in 
 terms of our 
 own exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Concerning 
 
 the use 
 
 throughout 
 
 of the word 
 
 God, see 
 
 PP- 74 
 and 75. 
 
 inevitably figure him as a creature 
 with like passions and senses and 
 sentiments as ourselves. We say that 
 we, his poor creatures, would not 
 countenance such pain as we see 
 about us ; but in saying this we 
 forget that we are not God, that we 
 have but five senses and three 
 dimensions, by which to form our 
 judgments. We can form no pos- 
 sible conception of the processes of 
 God, for the simple reason, probably, 
 that we are a part of them. We 
 hastily judge by two or three of the 
 conditions within our grasp, but we 
 might as well assume knowledge 
 of a pattern by a coloured thread 
 or two, or the design of the firma- 
 ment from our hole-and-corner solar 
 system. 
 
 IT is idle to put this question of 
 pain ultimately, quite idle to ask 
 the ultimate explanation of much 
 simpler matters, in fact of anything 
 in the world simple or complex. 
 Put relatively, there is, of course, 
 but one familiar answer, founded on 
 observation of the working of pain
 
 a literary 
 
 here : that it is but a process, and 
 must be judged not in itself, but by 
 its results. Some results we are 
 able to see, the majority we cannot 
 see, and our only possible method 
 is to argue from those results that 
 are seen towards those that are 
 unseen. 
 
 Before we arrive at any such dis- 
 tant point, however, the difficulties 
 of the question may be at least 
 reduced by a careful consideration 
 of facts right in the foreground. 
 
 ONE has no wish glibly to ex- 
 plain away the real troubles 
 of life, but it is futile to deny that 
 they are immeasurably intensified 
 (i) by the Sentimental Spectator, 
 and (2) by our habit of viewing pain 
 in the bulk. The sentimental spec- 
 tator is a person of exquisite nerves. 
 It is probable that the sufferer is 
 not, and thus we might make a scale 
 showing the graduated values of cer- 
 tain sufferings at certain points of 
 sensitiveness. But, suppose a sorrow 
 befalling the most highly sensitive 
 person. Recently a friend of the 
 
 D 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 Pain a 
 process. 
 
 The 
 
 Sentimental 
 Spectator.
 
 26 
 
 iReiigion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 writer's lost a devoted husband by 
 a sudden and violent death. It was 
 a very awful and heart-breaking 
 thing. One would not have been 
 surprised had she succumbed beneath 
 the shock. 'No,' said an old friend 
 of hers, ' you see, she is a woman of 
 many interests.' It sounded a hard 
 saying at first, but the more one 
 reflects upon it, how valuable does 
 it become ! She was ' a woman of 
 many interests ' how ? By reason 
 of that very sensibility of nature for 
 which we, her friends, had feared. It 
 was not that she did not love her 
 husband, with that love indeed 
 which makes the world a temple, 
 but, as I say, the very power which 
 made her capable of so intense an 
 affection, made her capable of inevit- 
 able compensations as well. The 
 loss was ten times, but the com- 
 pensations were also ten times. 
 In this way, if life does not tem- 
 per the wind to the shorn lamb, 
 it makes what wool remains the 
 warmer.
 
 a Literarp 
 
 THEN, too, we contemplate pain 
 too much in the bulk. We 
 speak of * Whitechapel' as though 
 there was not a happy person in it. 
 
 We contemplate pain much as we 
 contemplate the rainfall in a weather- 
 map. That inky patch represents 
 Manchester, we say, and we pity the 
 poor Manchester people as though 
 all the rain fell at once, and as 
 though every inhabitant of the town 
 was out in it, without umbrellas. 
 We forget in our charitable generali- 
 sation that Manchester rises every 
 morning with at least hopes of a 
 fine day, that it does occasionally 
 get it, that it has patience and 
 umbrellas for wet ones, and that its 
 occasional fine days are all the more 
 welcome for their scarcity. So with 
 pain. All this dark bulk of misery 
 is divided and sub-divided amongst 
 countless individuals. Each takes 
 his little bit of pain and bears it in 
 his corner. Moving amongst all this 
 army of darkness, though unseen by 
 us, is another army of light, of love, 
 of courage. 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 PAIN? 
 
 Pain con- 
 templated 
 too much in 
 the bulk.
 
 28 
 
 Cbe Religion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 Mistaken 
 Pity 
 
 Hinton on 
 Pain. 
 
 MUCH of our pity is of the 
 same kind as that which 
 pities a shoe-black for going bare- 
 footed, when he, bless you, would 
 not wear a pair of boots if you 
 were to buy them for him. Indeed, 
 nothing seems more certain than the 
 relativity of pain, and the correlation 
 of joy and pain is a commonplace. 
 Moreover, it is especially important to 
 remember what, in a little book on 
 The Mystery of Pain, the philosophi- 
 cal value of which may be overlooked 
 through its unfortunate theological 
 terminology, James Hinton continu- 
 ally insists upon : that pain borne for 
 the love of another, the pain of self- 
 sacrifice, is a positive joy ; and that 
 also many of our physical plea- 
 sures, such as a cold bath, involve 
 a certain amount of pain, as, so to 
 say, their fulcrum. To die for each 
 other has been the immemorial sum- 
 mum bonum of lovers, to 'die for 
 Christ' the sanctifying privilege of 
 martyrs ; and is there any example 
 more familiar, more significant, than 
 that of the mother, who forgetteth 
 straight the pain that she had in
 
 a Hiterarp 
 
 her joy that a man is born into the 
 world. 
 
 BUT, some one will object, in 
 itself pain is an evil thing. 
 ' In itself ! ' It is impossible to 
 conceive anything 'in itself inde- 
 pendent of relations, of antecedents 
 and consequences. Pain has no 
 existence without the sufferer, and 
 sufferers are not all agreed upon the 
 matter. 
 
 It is customary to regard rheuma- 
 tism as an evil, yet one has heard 
 pious folk thank God for their rheu- 
 matism, because it had taught them 
 what nothing else could patience 
 and forbearance; unconsciously illus- 
 trating Mr. Meredith's great apo- 
 thegm : ' there is nothing the body 
 suffers that the soul may not profit 
 by.' Yet, you persist, rheumatism 
 is none the less a bad thing. How 
 so ? Processes are to be judged 
 by their results. If rheumatism 
 is found to make me a better man, 
 can I say that rheumatism is a 
 bad thing ? Rheumatism does not 
 exist impersonally. It exists only 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 PAIN? 
 
 'In 
 
 itself I 
 an impos- 
 sible con- 
 ception. 
 
 The 
 
 Discipline 
 of Pain.
 
 Cfje Religion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 The 
 
 Sufferer 
 the Real 
 Authority. 
 
 in relation to certain, much-to-be- 
 pitied, individuals, and if some such 
 are able to say that it has helped 
 rather than harmed them surely 
 the testimony of the brave is as 
 good as that of the coward. Why 
 should we pay heed so exclu- 
 sively to the coward's statement of 
 life? 
 
 The 
 
 Ministry 
 of Pain. 
 
 Mr. George 
 Meredith. 
 
 THIS is a rough illustration of 
 what a large proportion of 
 the greatest men and women in all 
 ages have regarded as the ministry 
 of pain pain as the cleansing fire. 
 Such is still the courageous attitude 
 to-day of men so divergent in mind 
 as Mr. George Meredith and Mr. 
 Coventry Patmore. Mr. Meredith, in 
 his robust way, sees pain everywhere 
 about him as the crucible in which 
 life is refined, the process by which 
 
 ' From flesh unto spirit man grows 
 Even here on the sod under sun. 5 
 
 Any one who cares enough for his 
 salvation to thread the thorny ob- 
 scurities of Mr. Meredith's ' A Faith 
 on Trial,' will find in it the most
 
 a iLiterarp a 
 
 spiritually helpful of all recent poems. 
 There is no modern 'thinker' pro- 
 founder than he, no one who has 
 faced more spectres of the mind. 
 Yet he comes out of all his think- 
 ing the strongest of the apostles of 
 faith. 
 
 MR. PATMORE even formu- 
 lates a mystical luxury of 
 pain, after the ecstatic manner of 
 the old saints, and, personifying it, 
 prays for 
 
 . . . the learned spirit without attaint 
 
 That does not faint, 
 
 But knows both how to have thee and to lack, 
 
 And ventures many a spell, 
 
 Unlawful but for them that love so well, 
 
 To call thee back.' 
 
 WHO has not been neartened by 
 Browning's cold-water cure : 
 ' When pain ends, gain ends too ' ; 
 and, if the reader likes him better, 
 here is Mr. Herbert Spencer on the 
 subject. Speaking of, so to say, the 
 scientific religious man as opposed 
 to the conventionally religious, he 
 says : ' Convinced as he is that all 
 
 WHAT is 
 PAIN? 
 
 Mr. 
 
 Coventry 
 Patmore. 
 
 Browning. 
 
 Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer.
 
 Cbe Eeligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 Schopen- 
 hauer and 
 Spinoza. 
 
 punishment, as we see it wrought 
 out in the order of nature, is but 
 a disguised beneficence, there will 
 perhaps escape from him an angry 
 condemnation of the belief that 
 punishment is a Divine venge- 
 ance, and that Divine vengeance is 
 eternal.' 
 
 BUT hereon some one produces 
 Schopenhauer, and, as his 
 trump-card, plays Spinoza. No philo- 
 sopher so readily explains himself 
 as Schopenhauer. His philosophy 
 was simply the formulation of his 
 own special disease, the expres- 
 sion of his own ineffably petty and 
 uncomfortable disposition. He was 
 a small philosopher, with a great 
 literary gift. Spinoza, on the other 
 hand, was a very different person : he 
 was a great philosopher, with a com- 
 paratively small literary gift. But, 
 says the Spinozist, according to him 
 pain was an unmistakable evil. Joy 
 was the vitalising, fructifying power. 
 Let us hear Spinoza himself. Says he 
 in his Et/ucs: 'By pleasure I shall 
 therefore hereafter understand an
 
 a Litetarp 
 
 33 
 
 affection whereby the mind passes to 
 a greater perfection ; and by pain an 
 affection whereby it passes to a lesser 
 perfection.' Could anything be more 
 to the purpose of our argument? 
 Spinoza's English commentator, Sir 
 Frederick Pollock, seems to me con- 
 fusing in his interpretation of this 
 passage. In one case he implies that 
 Spinoza meant actual, immediate, 
 sensual pain pain 'in itself and 
 in another he says, ' we here use the 
 terms good and evil as denoting the 
 quality, not of the sensation as such 
 (for that would only be to say that 
 pleasure is pleasure and pain is pain), 
 but of the events and relations in the 
 organism immediately indicated by 
 the sensation.' 
 
 However, there are Spinoza's own 
 words, and if we have misinterpreted 
 them, after all, humanity does not 
 stand or fall by one of its great men, 
 and we may, if we find it necessary, 
 put Spinoza aside in favour of others 
 even greater, who have speculated 
 upon life no less profoundly than he. 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 PAIN 7
 
 34 
 
 Beligion of 
 
 WHAT IS 
 PAIN? 
 
 All 
 
 Theories 
 relative. 
 
 The 
 
 Question 
 at its worst. 
 
 IN this matter of pain, as in every 
 other under the sun, it is theory 
 against theory, and we shall each 
 accept that alone which suits our 
 temperament. Each, at the same 
 moment, is relatively true and rela- 
 tively false. 
 
 HOWEVER, it is always best to 
 put a question at its worst. 
 Let us suppose pain as an unmiti- 
 gated evil and allowing me, for the 
 sake of emphasis, to speak in theo- 
 logical terms let us thence deduce 
 that, whether God is all-merciful or 
 not, He is evidently not all-powerful. 
 Let us embrace the heresy of the 
 Manicheans, and hold that the world 
 is at the mercy of two rival dynasties 
 of good and evil God and Satan. 
 
 Well ! what if the fate of man ulti- 
 mately hangs on the fortune of battle, 
 on some celestial Armageddon, Avhy 
 should we be afraid? Why should 
 we so faint-heartedly conclude that 
 God will lose the battle? He has 
 hurled Satan out of heaven once, and 
 shall He not hurl him forth again ? 
 And even if, impious thought, Satan
 
 a Ltterarg 
 
 35 
 
 should triumph, are we not men, can 
 we not face all the pains of hell he 
 shall devise? If he slay us outright, 
 all is forgotten if he keep us in 
 torment, shall we not some day raise 
 God's banner again ? 
 
 truth is that our modern pes- 
 JL simism means but two things : 
 cowardice and selfishness. The self- 
 ish it is a merciful provision al- 
 ways, in the long-run, suffer the most, 
 though it may often seem otherwise. 
 And no observing man will deny that 
 this is, comparatively, an age of cow- 
 ardice. At any rate it is an age of 
 anaesthetics. Those who, like Mr. 
 Henley, chant 'The Song of the 
 Sword,' are at least so far right ; and 
 we may well pray for the spirit of our 
 brave forefathers, who went to 
 battle with stouter hearts than 
 we take to the dentist. 
 
 WHAT is 
 
 PAIN? 
 
 Pessim- 
 ism = 
 Cowardice 
 and Selfish- 
 ness. 
 
 An Age of 
 Cowardice.
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 A 
 Postulate. 
 
 Conditions 
 of the Will. 
 
 Cf)e Religion of 
 
 FREE-WILL 
 
 TJEFORE discussing two other 
 XD hackneyed questions which still 
 arise, or at least are always raised, in 
 regard to religion, allow me to postu- 
 late : that nowhere more than in re- 
 ligion is it wise to do without as 
 much as we can. One perennially 
 discussed question is that of ' Free- 
 will.' Is man ' a free agent/ or is he 
 'a machine'? or whatever metaphor 
 of passivity the disputant may prefer. 
 
 ' T7REE-WILL,' I venture to sug- 
 gest, is one of those dogmas 
 with which mankind can very well dis- 
 pense. For, when one considers that 
 will-power, like any other, is a certain 
 fixed quantity, at most a certain fixed 
 potentiality, within us, that evidently, 
 therefore, wills are not equal, and that 
 to say ' use your will ' to a man who 
 has been obviously born without one, 
 is to misunderstand his case ; when 
 one considers too that will is depen-
 
 a Utterarp 
 
 37 
 
 dent on other qualities of the nature, 
 and upon external influences, to 
 quicken or retard it, it is hard to 
 see that we have any more free-will 
 than, apparently, a flower. 
 
 You say But it is in your power to 
 avoid this or that course. Not neces- 
 sarily. At any rate, I probably want 
 to avoid it, my will struggles to avoid 
 it, but the other forces of my nature 
 are too strong for my will, and they 
 have their way. You say Had you 
 struggled a little more ! Ah ! but I 
 could not. It is an easy sum, a cal- 
 culation in simple proportion. You 
 will resist the temptation as long as 
 your will lasts, and when it is used up 
 you will give in ; or if your will hap- 
 pens to be stronger than the tempta- 
 tion, you will not give in. 
 
 Is not this, one is always asked, a 
 dangerous doctrine? Might it not 
 paralyse effort? Does it not make 
 men simply like clockwork? But 
 will the clockwork stop working 
 because you tell it that it has been 
 wound up, and is not, as it imagines, 
 going of itself? Besides, one does not 
 deny that the will may be strength- 
 
 FREE- 
 
 WILL 
 
 The 
 ' Clock- 
 work' 
 Objection.
 
 Cbe EeUgion of 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 Will 
 Batteries. 
 
 Matters 
 
 outside our 
 
 Will. 
 
 ened by influences from without. In 
 those is the only hope of the weak 
 will, but whether it shall encounter 
 those influences depends either on 
 accident or on the possibility of its 
 being strong enough to seek tonics 
 for its weakness. 
 
 Great books are among such bat- 
 teries for the recharging of the will 
 and Emerson's 'Essay on Self- 
 Reliance ' is, of course, a well-known 
 preparation of phosphates. 
 
 WHEN we battle so for free- 
 will, we forget how large a 
 proportion of our life is outside our 
 will, which yet we accept without a 
 murmur. Obviously our existence, 
 to start with, is beyond our control. 
 Our qualities are as inexorably fixed 
 for us as our stature. And then the 
 friends we meet, who, as we say, 
 change the whole course of our lives, 
 the man or woman we marry. We 
 are admittedly at the mercy of so- 
 called chance in these tremendously 
 important matters. Where is the 
 logic of drawing the line at our own 
 personal free-will ? For how these
 
 a Literary 
 
 39 
 
 persons or various accidents may 
 affect us is not a matter for our de- 
 cision ; it will depend on the relative 
 strength of individualities and on all 
 the conditions. This or that new 
 friend influences me for good in pro- 
 portion as my nature is open to good 
 impressions and no more ; and the 
 fact of our meeting like my nature 
 is an accident ; in other words, a 
 matter entirely outside my control. 
 It is simply a problem of human 
 chemistry. 
 
 WHAT then have we to live 
 for ? Is all our aspiration 
 and struggle a mockery ? Not at 
 all. Aspiration and struggle are 
 processes towards the development 
 of our nature to the limit of its ex- 
 pansion. Life is a reality governed 
 by illusions, and ' free-will ' is one of 
 the illusions that govern it. 
 
 What have we to live for? This 
 question, like almost every other that 
 teases the mind of man, has its raison 
 d'etre entirely in that primitive ego- 
 tism which makes man the measure 
 of the Universe. The inheritor of 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 What 
 
 have we to 
 
 live for? 
 
 The 
 
 Egotism of 
 
 Man.
 
 Cbc iReiigion of 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 Humility 
 the key to 
 
 many 
 mysteries. 
 
 an arrogant legend of his godlike 
 origin and prerogatives, he sees about 
 him laws in constant operation that 
 pay no heed to his pretensions. 
 Taught to believe that the world was 
 made to please him, and rinding it 
 sometimes failing to do so, he grows 
 puzzled and angry. If he could but 
 realise that his ideas of dominion are 
 absurd fancies, such as some African 
 chief might cherish of his being sole 
 imperator of the world ; if he could 
 but take up his position as the ser- 
 vant instead of the lord of creation, as 
 but one humble link in the mysteri- 
 ous chain of being, as but one child 
 born to the fatherhood of God, he 
 would smile to see how simple all 
 his complexities would suddenly be- 
 come. 
 
 When we are no longer called upon 
 to explain Nature in accordance with 
 the desires of one of its creatures, 
 when we no longer stand in the 
 centre of things, but humbly take 
 our place in that vast circumference 
 whose unknown centre is God, we 
 shall see with different eyes. Then 
 maybe we shall realise the deep mean-
 
 a Literarp 
 
 ing of the 'superstitious' old text, 
 and count it enough explanation of 
 the life of man to say that it exists 
 ' to the praise and glory of God ' 
 to the working out of His indefinable 
 purposes ; that we are the servants 
 of His household, the soldiers of His 
 army, and that the pay is life ! 
 Had He willed it this glorious gift 
 had never been ours. We might 
 have still slept on unsentient, un- 
 organised, in the trodden dust. But 
 He has raised us up and endowed 
 us with this wondrous framework of 
 subtle vibrating being, that no tittle 
 of the joy and beauty of His world 
 should escape us. 
 
 ME AN W H I LE, however, though 
 the astronomy of Copernicus 
 is taught in our schools, the world 
 still remains Ptolemaist We still 
 practically believe that the whole of 
 the firmament is an immense cande- 
 labra for lighting this bit of an earth ; 
 that it revolves round us instead of 
 our revolving with it round some in- 
 conceivably remote centre. We are 
 accustomed to talk as though God is 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 ' To the 
 
 praise and 
 
 glory of 
 
 God.' 
 
 The World 
 still Ptole- 
 maist in 
 practice, 
 though 
 Copernican 
 in theory.
 
 Cfje BeUgion of 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 Life a 
 free boon. 
 
 1 Counting 
 
 our 
 mercies.' 
 
 our servant, and that His laws must 
 needs square with our desires. We are 
 silly enough to talk of our rights. Man 
 has no rights in regard to God. He 
 has only mercies. He exists for God, 
 and not God for him. The incor- 
 rigible presumption and irreverence 
 of man ! It never seems to occur to 
 him that the joy and good things of 
 life, which he undoubtedly possesses, 
 have come to him all unasked and 
 un worked for a free boon. It is as 
 though, invited to a great feast as a 
 favour, we should quarrel with the host 
 because he had not consulted us as 
 to the memi, which, nevertheless, was 
 seen to please greatly the majority 
 of the guests. Our rights ! our griev- 
 ances against God ! When we have 
 given due thanks for our mercies: 
 for the mere sky and sunshine, for 
 the wonder of love, for the miracle of 
 beauty, for the humblest joys of 
 sensation then it will be time to 
 talk about those. 
 
 IF it appears that man has actually 
 no say in his life, that he is but 
 clockwork, well, it is clockwork full
 
 a Hiteratp 
 
 43 
 
 of sweet chimes. Or let us say that 
 man is like a flower planted here by 
 God to grow according to His will 
 and for some, to us, undivinable end, 
 just as we plant daffodils in our 
 garden plots and never tell them 
 why. At all events, one thing is 
 certain : that, as Sir Thomas Browne 
 says, ' God has not made a single 
 creature who can understand Him ' ; 
 and another thing is no less sure, that 
 it is not to the arrogant spirit of 
 modern inquiry that He will ever be 
 revealed. 
 
 BUT to return in conclusion to 
 free-will, is it to be doubted 
 that we have far more to gain by 
 losing than keeping it ? Our precious 
 'individualities' are curtailed, it is 
 true, but in the next chapter I shall 
 venture to suggest that we exag- 
 gerate our regard for those ; and 
 what we gain in their place is, to 
 my thinking, considerably more im- 
 portant : a very precious gain in 
 charity to our fellows, in consola- 
 tion to ourselves. 
 
 We already see the humanising 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 The loss of 
 
 ' Free-will ' 
 
 really a 
 
 gain.
 
 44 
 
 6e iReltgion of 
 
 FREE- 
 WILL 
 
 Familiar 
 notions 
 on the 
 subject 
 
 influence of the more scientific view 
 in the adoption by public opinion of 
 such phrases as ' homicidal mania,' 
 ' erotomania,' ' dipsomania ' : terms 
 which obviously imply that man's 
 ' sins ' are not to be visited as 
 ' crimes,' but charitably regarded as 
 the painful operation of diseased 
 functions, independently trans- 
 mitted, and more than enough 
 punishment in themselves. 
 
 T 
 
 VI 
 
 THE HEREAFTER 
 
 HE question of 'the life here- 
 after ' is by many regarded as 
 the most serious problem of religion. 
 They tell us that a future life is a 
 necessary completion of this ; that in 
 such a life alone can the injustice of 
 this one be corrected, the forces set 
 working in this be developed to their 
 logical results. At the same time 
 they postulate that future life as a 
 state of perfection. Surely these three 
 statements are incompatible. A life 
 that would be the working out to
 
 a Literarp 
 
 45 
 
 their conclusion, supposing we can 
 imagine conclusion, of the forces of 
 this one would not be a perfect life, 
 as we understand it, but simply a re- 
 production of this. Moreover, Nature 
 does not bind herself to bring all 
 sowings to harvest. It is one of her 
 most familiar mysteries that she is 
 able to waste and yet want not. No 
 spendthrift may rival the lavishness 
 of Nature, and the Eastern queen who 
 drank dissolved pearl as a liqueur 
 was economical in comparison. 
 
 THIRST let us ask : not whether 
 the future life, the survival of 
 personality after death, be true or not, 
 but whether we really care about it 
 so much as we imagine. In religion, 
 we have said, it is especially wise 
 to do without as much as we can. 
 Can we then do without the idea of a 
 future life, the immortality of the Ego, 
 or is it a necessity of our life here ? 
 
 Let us first bring the question of 
 personality into the foreground of our 
 present existence, and ask ourselves 
 if we do not exaggerate its value to 
 us here and now. 
 
 THE 
 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 Do we 
 really care 
 about Im- 
 mortality?
 
 4 6 
 
 C&e Eeiigion of 
 
 A theory 
 O f Friend- 
 
 THE p?OR example, we say that we love 
 A our friends 'for themselves.' Do 
 we mean by that that we love them, so 
 to say, in the lump, bad and good to- 
 gether ; or that we love them because 
 
 snip. & 
 
 of their possession of certain qualities 
 valued by us, for the sake of which, 
 possibly, we are content to overlook 
 certain other qualities not attractive 
 to us, perhaps actually repellent? 
 Suppose we lose that friend, but 
 shortly after meet another person 
 who possesses like qualities. Do we 
 feel quite the old need for the old 
 friend, or have we not practically 
 found him again in the new one? 
 I do not forget the power of asso- 
 ciation, but association is a quick- 
 growing ivy, and will shortly grow up 
 about the new friendship as the old. 
 And, of course, we may not make a 
 second such acquaintance, but the 
 chances are that we shall. 
 
 IF you answer that the new friend 
 will probably in course of time 
 take the place of the old one, then it 
 is clear that it is the qualities of both, 
 not as we say their individualities,
 
 a JLiterarp 
 
 47 
 
 their Egos, that we value. Actually 
 we do not love either ' for themselves,' 
 but for their good-nature, their wit, 
 their beauty, or whatever their quali- 
 ties may be ; and those qualities are 
 to be met with over and over again, 
 possibly in still more satisfying har- 
 monies. Thus we have not to wait to 
 meet our old friends again in heaven, 
 we meet them again already on earth 
 in the new ones. Nor does such 
 a view abolish the noble virtue of con- 
 stancy ; for what generous spirit can 
 lightly forget the men and women 
 who have, for however short a time, 
 been to them the vessels of the divine- 
 revelations of life. If we are constant 
 to great qualities, we cannot be incon- 
 stant to their possessors. 
 
 ONE finds the same fallacy of per- 
 sonality in regard to places we 
 live in, and indeed more or less in 
 regard to everything with which we 
 are for any time habitually associated. 
 We return for our holidays to one par- 
 ticular place again and again, in fancy 
 attributing to it a certain exceptional 
 character ; yet if we are prevented 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 The fallacy 
 of ' Per- 
 sonality. '
 
 43 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 The 
 alleged 
 
 C&e Religion of 
 
 going there and have to make trial of 
 another place, we soon find that it was 
 not, after all, the idiosyncrasies of our 
 old resort, but merely the qualities it 
 had in common with most other such 
 places the sky, the trees, the grass, 
 the sea, which are good wherever we 
 find them. 
 
 Do we love a flower ' for itself,' for 
 its Ego, or for its charms of form or 
 colour, which any one of its species 
 possesses in perhaps an even greater 
 degree ? 
 
 Of course, the existence of the Ego 
 is an obvious fact, whether we regard 
 it as inhabiting the body or simply as 
 including it : but what I would try 
 to show is that we exaggerate its 
 importance to us. 
 
 "\ T 7 
 \\ 
 
 E often hear people say that so 
 precious is personality that 
 
 precious- i 
 
 ness the meanest creature living would not, 
 if it could, change places with the 
 highest. All I can say then is more 
 fool it ! Such general statements are 
 mainly fallacies, and, for my part, I 
 can but think that, far from our 
 individualities being so precious to
 
 a Literary 
 
 49 
 
 us, many of us if we were wise 
 would welcome a general return to 
 the melting-pot in the hope of a 
 better start next time. 
 
 A NOTHER favourite reflection 
 2~\ on this subject is : that, if there 
 be no hereafter, all the precious spirit- 
 ual and intellectual acquirements of 
 our lives have been stored for nothing : 
 our character been laboriously built 
 up, our sensibilities exquisitely at- 
 tuned, to no end. 
 
 BUT how so? Have they not 
 been in full operation for a 
 lifetime ? 'Tis a pity truly that the 
 old fiddle should be broken at last ; 
 but then for how many years has it 
 not been discoursing most excellent 
 music. We naturally lament when an 
 old piece of china is some sure day 
 dashed to pieces ; but then for how long 
 a time has its beauty been delighting 
 and refining those, maybe long dead, 
 who have looked upon it ! 
 
 If there were no possibility of more 
 such fiddles, more such china, their 
 loss would be an infinitely more 
 
 THE 
 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 The Waste- 
 fulness of 
 Death. 
 
 Life not 
 
 necessarily 
 
 futile.
 
 iHeUgton of 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 Omar 
 
 Khayyam. 
 
 serious matter ; but on this the sad- 
 glad old Persian admonishes us : 
 
 ' . . . fear not lest Existence, closing your 
 Account and mine, should know the like 
 
 no more ; 
 
 The Eternal Sdkf from the bowl has pour'd 
 Millions of Bubbles like us, and shall pour.' 
 
 Nature ruthlessly tears up her replicas 
 age after age, but she is slow to destroy 
 the plates. Her lovely forms are all 
 safely housed in her memory, and 
 beauty and goodness sleep secure in 
 her heart, in spite of all the arrows of 
 death. 
 
 ' Irrepar- 
 able loss' of 
 a Learned 
 Man. 
 
 PRESIDES, in many cases, we 
 JD strangely misconceive, and 
 overvalue, the acquirements of our 
 existence. When a learned man dies, 
 for example, we hear the newspapers 
 bewail the amount of learning that 
 has gone with him. To think of all 
 that Latin and Greek and Hebrew, 
 Egyptology and numismatics and 
 conchology and what not, run to 
 waste in the grave ! If he could only 
 have taken it all with him ! But, then, 
 supposing a hereafter, what possible 
 use would he find for numismatics in
 
 a Literarp span 
 
 heaven ? So frequently we lament THE 
 the leaving behind upon earth of gifts 
 and gains which have no conceivable 
 value elsewhere. And in regard to the 
 loss sustained by his countrymen in the 
 death of that learned man, is it not an 
 axiom that such people always ' leave 
 the world better than they found it ' ? 
 
 But, supposing that he has not 
 bequeathed his learning in his own 
 books, it either exists already in the 
 books of other men or in the actual 
 facts of which it could be no more than 
 observation. And even supposing it 
 all lost which is impossible is it so 
 very great a matter ? Learned men 
 are merely catalogues to the library 
 of the universe, and there are forces 
 constantly engaged in compiling such 
 catalogues. 
 
 All a man earns here he can spend 
 here, and if he chooses to hoard it, it 
 is his own affair, and probably no 
 great loss to us. For no man that 
 has anything of real ultimate value 
 to his fellows can keep it to himself. 
 He may withhold his learning, and 
 bury his wealth ; but his character 
 his love, his strength, his tenderness ;
 
 5 2 
 
 C&e Religion of 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 The Here- 
 after as 
 Compen- 
 sation. 
 
 The Braver 
 View. 
 
 these, the only gifts worth consider- 
 ing, he cannot hide, and the operation 
 of them he is powerless to limit. 
 
 BUT, you remind me, what of 
 those unhappy people to whom 
 reference was made at the beginning 
 of our inquiry, those who have had 
 but a poor show in life, been unfor- 
 tunate and oppressed ? To consider 
 them is but to reopen the whole ques- 
 tion of the mystery of pain. I can 
 only repeat that we are not the best 
 judges of other people's joy and sor- 
 row, and that those we pity are very 
 likely not so badly off as they seem 
 from our point of view. For the most 
 unlucky the proportion of joy in life 
 is probably greater than we usually 
 admit, and it is surely a mistake to 
 measure joy and pain by duration in 
 time. Then, some natures are more 
 grateful than others. While the weak, 
 perhaps, always believe in a hereafter, 
 the brave have faith in their past. 
 They do not forget that they too 
 had once their purple hour, and find 
 courage to bear the subsequent pain 
 in the thought of it. Offer them their
 
 a iliterarp 
 
 53 
 
 lives over again and they would pro- 
 bably accept them. Theirs is the 
 manly, grateful temper of him in Mr. 
 Davidson's poem, who said : 
 
 ' I think that I am still in Nature's debt, 
 Scorned, disappointed, starving, bankrupt, 
 
 old, 
 
 Because I loved a lady in my youth, 
 And was beloved in sooth.' 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 Mr. John 
 
 Davidson's 
 
 ' Fleet 
 
 Street 
 
 Eclogues. ' 
 
 "OESIDES, if, in supposed justice, 
 J_) we assume a future life for the 
 sake of those ' who fail'd under the 
 heat of this life's day,' it seems hard to 
 imagine them any better off. Even 
 for any consideration it is impossible 
 to conceive a toy heaven, with all set 
 right ; and supposing that we postu- 
 late cycles of existence after the Bud- 
 dhist dream, would the weak in this 
 life be the strong in the next ? 
 
 Moreover, lovely as that dream is, 
 I fancy that its appeal is most to the 
 happy. For the happy life seems so 
 good that they would it might go on 
 indefinitely through ever-ascending 
 circles ; for the unhappy, may be, it 
 seems so sad that they would give 
 thanks to have done with it, once 
 
 The 
 
 Hereafter 
 a belief for 
 the Happy 
 
 rather 
 than the 
 Unhappy.
 
 54 
 
 C&e Eeiigton of 
 
 THE 
 HERE- 
 AFTER 
 
 'The 
 
 Garden of 
 Proserpine.' 
 
 and for all Anything short of the 
 perfect life, or the perfect death, 
 seems too great a risk ; and you 
 could bring them no gladder news 
 than Mr. Swinburne's 
 
 ' That no life lives for ever, 
 That dead men rise up never, 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea.' 
 
 I HAVE not felt it necessary here 
 to traverse the various familiar 
 arguments for and against the immor- 
 tality of the soul. They are in print 
 for those who need them, and will 
 be accepted or rejected in accord- 
 ance with the needs of individual 
 readers. Those who want to believe 
 in a future life can do so. No philo- 
 sopher can rob them of it, and pro- 
 bably the arguments are the stronger 
 on the side of belief. Even if it be an 
 illusion, illusion, as we have said, is 
 one of life's methods. My wish is to 
 insist that, whichever theory be true, 
 it does not really much matter. We 
 can do without the hereafter and the 
 Sadducee need not make us afraid. 
 The life here is sufficient to itself.
 
 a Ltterarp e@an 55 
 
 Practically we admit it, by the way THE 
 in which we paint the supposed next 
 life in the colours of this ; it is only 
 theologically that we doubt it. Our 
 clinging to personal identity is an 
 illusion. We do not really cherish it 
 so much as we imagine. What we 
 do cherish is living and what matter 
 if we live again in our present indi- 
 viduality or a new one? After the 
 dip in Lethe, we shall not know the 
 difference. That we shall live some- 
 where in some continuation of qualities 
 and forces is certain: so much 
 of immortality is at least 
 assured us. 
 
 VII 
 ESSENTIAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 THE reader may be aware that 'ischris- 
 I have undertaken these notes 
 to answer for myself a question raised out? ' 
 by myself d propos of a poem by 
 Mr. Robert Buchanan. Here I have 
 nothing to do with Mr. Buchanan's 
 poem, but only with one or two of the
 
 Cfje Beligion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Christ and 
 the Life 
 to come. 
 
 wild and whirling answers to that 
 question. Mr. Buchanan's final posi- 
 tion or one of his final positions ! 
 was, I think, that Christianity stood 
 or fell by that belief in the hereafter 
 which we have just been discussing. 
 
 IT is perfectly true that according 
 to our English version of the 
 New Testament Christ did make many 
 definite assertions about the life to 
 come. He promised it as a reward 
 to the righteous, He brandished it as 
 a threat to the sinner. But we must 
 not forget that Christ confessedly 
 taught in parables, and we are at 
 liberty to conclude that He spoke in 
 them oftener than He perhaps felt it 
 desirable to admit. It is quite pos- 
 sible that He used the phrase ' the life 
 eternal ' as Spinoza used it, as Brown- 
 ing has used it in his beautiful phrase 
 ' the moment eternal,' and it seems 
 nearly certain that He used the term 
 Heavenly Father in a sense very far 
 removed from the customary anthro- 
 pomorphic interpretations of its mean- 
 ing. A gloss on the recently dis- 
 covered gospel reads for 'My God,
 
 a Ltterarp 
 
 57 
 
 my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 me ? ' ' My strength, my strength,' etc. , 
 which, whatever its authenticity, is 
 not without significance. 
 
 IN whatever sense Christ used such 
 phrases, it is certain that His 
 evangelists have distorted their im- 
 portance out of all proportion to the 
 rest of His teaching. Only thus has 
 it become possible to represent Christ- 
 ianity, as it was recently represented, 
 as a religion entirely devised for 
 cloudland, 
 
 ' a dream for life too high, 
 It is a bird that hath no feet for earth.' 
 
 A more unwarrantable mis-statement 
 could not well be. There is nothing 
 with which Christ's utterances have 
 more to do than the life here. Con- 
 duct to its ultra-ideal developments 
 is His constant theme. But, objects 
 the critic, His very ideals of conduct 
 are impossible, quixotic, beyond the 
 reach of human nature. Surely an 
 ideal is an ideal simply because it 
 outsoars human nature. And, quix- 
 otic or not, can any critic of Christ- 
 
 ESSEN- 
 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Christianity 
 
 pre- 
 eminently 
 a religion 
 for this 
 world. 
 
 II
 
 C6e Eeiigton of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Is Christ- 
 ianity on 
 the wane ? 
 
 ianity deny that as men are seen to 
 approximate to its central teaching of 
 self-subjection they are seen to be 
 happy, and that the further they are 
 seen to diverge from it the more 
 wretched do they become. At least 
 Christ put His finger on the central 
 source of man's misery eliminate 
 self, and you have done all. 
 
 THE merely historical question 
 was raised whether Christianity 
 was in the ascendant or not at the 
 present time. Some, taking isolated 
 doctrines, such as the hereafter, 
 answered in the negative ; some 
 even seemed to think that, tested 
 by that very central teaching of self- 
 sacrifice, it was on the wane. Man- 
 kind was harder and more selfish 
 than ever. But this seemed to have 
 been generally felt to be a miscon- 
 ception, obviously disproved by the 
 wide spread of philanthropic feeling, 
 the far-reaching development of those 
 democratic conceptions which are un- 
 deniably based on Christ's uncom- 
 promising communism, His gospel for 
 the poor.
 
 a Literary span 
 
 59 
 
 It was gladly admitted that the 
 merely ecclesiastical incrustations of 
 Christ's teaching were certainly being 
 cast away; but for that very reason, 
 it was urged, the veritable doctrines 
 underlying them were exercising 
 greater power than ever. 
 
 SOME said that those doctrines 
 claimed to be ' essential ' to 
 Christianity were no less the property 
 of other religions. This no man 
 would think of denying. The signifi- 
 cance of Christ as an historical figure 
 is not so much that He was the pro- 
 phet of any absolutely new religious 
 intuitions, as that He gathered up into 
 one masterful synthesis those that 
 had enjoyed but an isolated expres- 
 sion aforetime. The intense spiritu- 
 ality of the Hebrew, the impassioned 
 self-annihilation of the Hindoo, the 
 joyous naturalism of the Greek : He 
 combined all these in an undreamed 
 of unity, and gave to it the impetus 
 of His own masterful, emotional indi- 
 viduality. 
 
 It was not the other-worldliness 
 alone of His teaching that was its 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 The Power 
 of Christ- 
 ianity 
 largely 
 in its 
 composite 
 character.
 
 6o 
 
 C6e iReligion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 The 
 
 Humanity 
 as well as 
 Spirituality 
 of Christ's 
 teaching. 
 
 significance, but the everyday hu- 
 manity that was likewise blent with 
 it. Christ preached the life here no 
 less than the life eternal, and He em- 
 phasised both as no other teacher has 
 ever done. He not only gave an im- 
 pulse to the immemorial intuitions 
 of man, but He realised them with 
 an unprecedented intensity of convic- 
 tion. Self-sacrifice with Him became 
 a passion, the apprehension of the 
 spiritual significance of temporal life 
 an actual vision. And He affirmed 
 both in wonderful hyperboles, which 
 have of necessity in the course of 
 time suffered misunderstanding and 
 distortion. 
 
 Truth 
 inevitably 
 soiled in 
 its trans- 
 mission 
 
 through the 
 hands of 
 Apostles 
 
 and Priests. 
 
 THERE must inevitably, said 
 M. Renan, be something bornt 
 about the apostle of any creed, and 
 the apostles of Christ have been 
 no exceptions to the rule. How 
 Christ's radiant intuitions have been 
 materialised into opaque dogmas, 
 no one need be told. The mis- 
 taken aim of Christian teachers has 
 been the mistake of all teachers 
 of ideal creeds, to bring down the
 
 a Literary span 
 
 61 
 
 /CATHOLICISM, for example, 
 V_^ is simply average humanity 
 in a surplice that is the secret 
 of its hold upon the world. 
 It practically admits that Christian 
 ideals are hopelessly out of reach, 
 though it theoretically preaches them, 
 more rigidly, perhaps, than any other 
 creed. Indeed, as one very well 
 understands, the Catholic Church is 
 a form of symbolism. It is of the 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 
 IANITY 
 
 ideal to the comprehension of the 
 
 lower side of human nature which CH RIST- 
 
 accomplished, it is of no further 
 
 use. 
 
 Organised Christianity has probably 
 done more to retard the ideals that 
 were its Founder's than any other 
 agency in the world. Moral teach- 
 ing without spiritual significance is 
 of little force. The ecclesiastics into 
 whose hands Christianity soon fell, 
 being, as the majority of ecclesiastics 
 must be, unspiritually minded, dark- 
 ened the symbolism of Christ, and 
 thus deprived the moral side of His 
 teaching of a great part of its motive 
 force. 
 
 Catholic- 
 ism.
 
 62 
 
 C6e Religion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Concerning 
 Priests. 
 
 The 
 Tragedy 
 
 of the 
 Idealist. 
 
 essence of a symbol that it stands 
 for something which transcends itself. 
 A Catholic priest, for example, is a 
 symbol of what a man, according 
 to one mistaken version of Christ's 
 teaching, should be. Illogical people 
 may point out that his life does not 
 square with his transcendental creed. 
 But what of that ? A man may 
 not be at once the symbol and 
 the thing symbolised, and a priest, 
 like a policeman, is not always on 
 duty. 
 
 HRISTIANITY,like every other 
 form of idealism, has suffered 
 degradation at the hands of its ex- 
 ponents. Even its very earliest profes- 
 sors, Christ's own disciples, were long 
 in realising that the kingdom He pro- 
 mised them was no earthly one, and 
 had no bearing on Jewish-Roman poli- 
 tics. It is the tragic fate of the idealist 
 ever to be thus misunderstood, inter- 
 preted with a base literalness, by his 
 own followers. A throng of idealists 
 is an impossibility. Their talk is 
 of heavenly bread, but their thoughts 
 are of the earthly ; and without the
 
 a Literarp 
 
 miracle and the twelve baskets full 
 of fragments no teacher can hold 
 them beyond a day in the wilderness. 
 One recalls the sublime figure of 
 Brand, with his great dream of a 
 church not made with hands, as he 
 strides with inspired gaze in front 
 of his horde of earthly-minded bur- 
 gesses, whose so different dream is 
 but of a church of stone and lime, 
 with a tower and an organ that shall 
 put the neighbouring parishes in the 
 shade a poor, little pathetic muni- 
 cipal triumph. Brand is, indeed, the 
 tragic type of the idealist through 
 the ages, and his followers the type 
 of his converts. 
 
 TIME would seem to love bitter 
 ironical jests, and surely it 
 had never a stranger one to amuse 
 it than the curious logic of cause 
 and effect, which, from a pure teach- 
 ing of the spirit, a sweeping crusade 
 against dogmas and formulae, has 
 resulted in an intricate system of 
 rites and ceremonies, narrow and un- 
 spiritual as was ever enforced by 
 Scribe and Pharisee ; which, from a 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Ibsen's 
 ' Brand.' 
 
 The 
 
 Paradox 
 
 of Christian 
 
 History.
 
 6 4 
 
 C6e Eeligion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 teaching of poverty, meekness, and 
 simplicity, has evolved the proudest 
 and most luxurious theocracy known 
 to history. It is thus by insidious ar- 
 tifice that the world has so far con- 
 quered its turbulent, inflammatory 
 spirits. Not by repression, but by a 
 pretended acquiescence ; not by the 
 persecutor but by the priest, has the 
 world so far won the battle against 
 Christ. 
 
 One can hardly wonder that the 
 word Christian, which, maybe for 
 some of us, strikes such a heavenly 
 chime of association, should for many 
 others be a name of veritable exe- 
 cration ; and, illogical as it may be, 
 the world can hardly be blamed for 
 looking at the example before the 
 precept of putting in harsh con- 
 trast the creed and the history of 
 Christianity. It is but a rough 
 reasoner, and when the Christian 
 talks of loving his enemies, it be- 
 thinks it of the Inquisition and 
 Smithfield ; when he talks of losing 
 all for Christ, it forms a Titian- 
 coloured picture of the Vatican ; 
 when he talks of the happy lot of
 
 a Literary 
 
 those who serve the Cross, it recalls 
 only a bitter fanaticism which has 
 so often a trodden under foot the 
 
 * 
 
 gentle and joyous innocencies of 
 nature. 
 
 YET, nevertheless, the history of 
 Christianity has very little 
 to do with the teaching of Christ, 
 and any deductions drawn from it 
 against that teaching are entirely 
 irrelevant. We have been told that 
 the world has tried the Gospel of 
 Christ and found it wanting. To 
 that the answer is simple : the world 
 has never tried the Gospel of Christ, 
 and in this nineteenth century of 
 the so-called Christian era, it has 
 yet to begin. 
 
 SOON after the first purity of 
 Christian evangelisation passed 
 with its temporal successes, the cere- 
 monial paganism which it had driven 
 out from the old temples slily stole 
 by the back way into the new ones, 
 and thus conquered the young creed 
 at the very moment when it seemed 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST 
 IANITY 
 
 The 
 History of 
 Zhristianit 
 and the 
 Teaching 
 of Christ 
 not to be 
 con used. 
 
 The World 
 has never 
 
 tried the 
 Gospel of 
 
 Christ. 
 
 Larly per- 
 version of 
 he Christ- 
 an Ideal
 
 66 
 
 C&e fteitgion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 The World 
 
 to have been conquered by it. The 
 paganised Christianity ' which was 
 the result, the world has certainly 
 tried and found wanting. On the 
 other hand, fanatical developments 
 of Christ's teaching, which, in mis- 
 taken zeal for one side of it, neglected 
 to observe that harmony of the 
 whole which is so vital, have been no 
 less harmful to the world. Between 
 the ritualistic priest who practically 
 nullified its spirituality, and the de- 
 votee who ignored its humanity, the 
 vitalising principle entirely escaped, 
 save for certain fortunate spirits 
 and happy little communities of 
 saints. 
 
 BUT, indeed, the world was obvi- 
 ay lor ousl y not ready for so simple 
 
 Christ- and profound a gospel. It had yet to 
 pass through material preoccupations 
 which made it impossible even to 
 consider a philosophy that regarded 
 such interests with so mystical an eye. 
 It was still too occupied with Time 
 and Space to waste either on Eternity. 
 Great shadowy lands beyond the 
 horizon of the world still glimmered
 
 a Literary 
 
 67 
 
 in the imagination, with something 
 almost of a spiritual mystery. America 
 and Australia were still Hesperides 
 fascinating the adventurous instinct of 
 man. Great material forces such as 
 steam and electricity had yet to be dis- 
 covered and tamed. Most important 
 of all, Copernicus had to be reckoned 
 with. We perhaps hardly realise the 
 profound spiritual significance of that 
 heretical 'new' astronomy, which 
 Galileo might only whisper under his 
 breath. Anathematised as it was by 
 the Catholic Church, it was the most 
 truly Christian discovery ever made 
 for it at once rendered it possible for 
 all men to look upon the world and the 
 kingdoms thereof in that true perspec- 
 tive, which only a few had previously 
 been able to divine by fortunate 
 intuition. 
 
 IT may be said that our material pre- 
 occupations are far from ended, 
 that scientific discovery is ' in its in- 
 fancy ' ; but though that be true in a 
 limited sense, it can never again be 
 true as it was four hundred years ago. 
 The brain of the world is not so 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 1 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Material 
 preoccupa- 
 tions. 
 
 The spirit- 
 ual signifi- 
 cance of 
 Copernicus. 
 
 The true 
 
 perspective 
 
 of Life.
 
 68 
 
 Cfje iReitgion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 A simile 
 of Man. 
 
 The Com- 
 plex is 
 always 
 
 obvious, it 
 is the 
 Simple 
 that is 
 
 mysterious. 
 
 exclusively employed on such matters 
 as aforetime. They are no longer so 
 universally momentous, and, instead 
 of covering the whole domain of 
 thought, are now only provinces 
 therein, presided over by specialists. 
 In short we have, I repeat, found 
 the true perspective of life. Man, 
 like a settler in a new country, has 
 all these centuries been occupied 
 in making hfs home habitable, in 
 building and planting, in cutting 
 roads, in studying the climate and 
 the bearings of his new home. Pre- 
 sently, it is to be hoped, he will need 
 to be less busied about these things, 
 and be able, after all his preparations 
 for living, to sit him down and 
 actually begin to live. 
 
 ' I ^HE teaching of Christ is, as we 
 J- have said, simple, but it is the 
 simple which is always the hardest 
 to understand : for complexity like 
 mechanism may be puzzling, but it is 
 never profound patience can always 
 unravel it ; it is a compound and 
 can readily be reduced to its ele- 
 ments ; but simplicity is, as it were, an
 
 a Literary 
 
 6 9 
 
 element in itself, and is profound with 
 the profundity of deep clear water. 
 The complex may be a riddle, but the 
 simple is a mystery. The apprehen- 
 sion of Christ's profound simplicity 
 is the reward only of long and com- 
 plex spiritual struggle except, of 
 course, in the case of those happy 
 ones who come into it at birth 
 as into an inheritance. It is the 
 simplicity which can only come of 
 experience or genius. 
 
 THE world has now passed through 
 much of that experience which 
 alone could make possible its realisa- 
 tion of Christ's simplicity. It has 
 sought happiness in wealth, in empire, 
 in luxury,and found them vanity; and 
 it is already turning wistfully towards 
 that simple life of the early world, 
 which it lived before it was led astray 
 by the ignis fatuus of ' civilisation.' 
 If the Christian era has exemplified 
 but little the Christian ideal, at least 
 it has by its mistakes proved the 
 truth of that ideal. 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 The World 
 
 more 
 ready for 
 Christ- 
 ianity.
 
 i)e Eeligion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Christ 
 the one 
 authority 
 
 on the 
 Christian 
 
 Ideal. 
 
 Christ mis- 
 interpreted. 
 
 AS to what that ideal is, Christ 
 Himself is the one authority 
 and example. It is idle to cite 
 the lucubrations of theologians or 
 the unfaithful lives of those who 
 are but Christians in name. In dis- 
 cussing a scientific theory we do not 
 insist on its mistaken expounders, we 
 go direct to its original discoverer. 
 How is it that in discussing the Chris- 
 tian ideal the authority last referred 
 to should be that of its Founder ? 
 
 /'"CHRIST'S teaching was an im- 
 v_x passioned morality based upon 
 a profound mysticism. Very soon 
 that mysticism became hopelessly 
 perverted by teachers incapable of 
 understanding it, and the dogmas 
 into which it hardened almost en- 
 tirely obscured its morality as well. 
 The Church soon began to insist on 
 the mere ingenuities of theology 
 rather than the vital necessities of 
 conduct. Christ's parabolic utter- 
 ances became materialised into state- 
 ments of literal fact, and instead of 
 a spiritual apprehension of them, a 
 merely intellectual realisation was
 
 a Literary 
 
 demanded. When Christ declared 
 that He had 'seen the Father,' His 
 earthly listeners at once pictured a 
 visible bodily meeting : they had no 
 inkling of that exalted mood of the 
 spirit when the meaning of the world 
 seems to become suddenly crystal- 
 clear, the solid earth to grow strangely 
 transparent, and, like a dove flying 
 across the deep serene, comes the 
 clear sweet voice of the soul of the 
 world calling faith and peace to the 
 soul of the creature. 
 
 When Christ spoke of the king- 
 dom of heaven, they pictured it 
 simply as a fairer earth rocking at 
 anchor in the deeps of the blue sky : 
 an essentially earthly kingdom with 
 good appointments at court and un- 
 limited gratification of earthly de- 
 sires. The apprehension of it as a 
 rapt state of the spirit, a state into 
 which it has learnt to soar -above 
 the pains and preoccupations of 
 earthly life, while still ' in the body/ 
 was far from them. To tell such 
 that the soul of a good man is 
 heaven is to disappoint, and even 
 Giles Fletcher's lovely description 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 Giles 
 Fletcher's 
 ' Christ's 
 Triumph 
 
 after 
 Death.'
 
 Heiigion of 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 The true 
 Christian. 
 
 of the peace of the blest must, it is 
 to be feared, seem tame to those who 
 have looked for joys spiced with more 
 of the pungent condiments of earth : 
 
 ' It is no flaming lustre, made of light ; 
 
 No sweet concent, or well-tim'd harmonic : 
 Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite, 
 Or flowrie odour, mixt with spicerie ; 
 No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily ; 
 And yet it is a kinde of inwarde feast, 
 A harmony, that sounds within the brest, 
 An odour, light, embrace, in which the soule 
 doth rest.' 
 
 It is only Christ's moral precepts 
 that are to be taken literally : the 
 law of love, the duty of humility, the 
 subjection of self, and the purifica- 
 tion of the heart. All the rest is 
 parable mystic hints of the blessed- 
 ness of the emancipated spirit, which 
 are but darkened and debased by 
 ignorant sensual interpretations. Be- 
 yond any teacher that ever lived 
 Christ was the prophet of Love, 
 through all its natural and mystical 
 developments. That is His complete 
 significance. The true Christian is 
 the perfect lover, and those whom 
 it helps to associate their lives with 
 moving names may ' without usurpa-
 
 a Hiterarp 
 
 73 
 
 tion assume the honourable style of 
 a Christian/ though they cannot sign 
 the Thirty-nine Articles, so that they 
 love. It is strange to reflect that up 
 till recently the name of Christian 
 has been denied to such, and has 
 been allowed only to those who sub- 
 scribe to the mistakes rather 
 than the verities of 
 Christianity. 
 
 ESSEN- 
 TIAL 
 CHRIST- 
 IANITY 
 
 VIII 
 DOGMA AND SYMBOLISM 
 
 WE have of late years been so 
 aroused to the great dangers 
 of Dogma and Symbolism, as illus- 
 trated by the adulteration of the pure 
 Christian ideal, that we have been 
 inclined to throw the whole over- 
 board as ecclesiastical lumber. There 
 are many whom the mere use of 
 Christian phraseology, even in the 
 broadest application, irritates out of 
 all sober thinking, so associated is it in 
 their minds with a cant which they 
 
 The soul of 
 good in 
 Christian 
 Dogma. 
 
 K
 
 74 
 
 Cbe Heligion of 
 
 DOGMA 
 AND 
 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 The word 
 God and its 
 alterna- 
 tives. 
 
 rightly feel to be the death of true 
 religion. It is hardly to be expected 
 of them that they should pause to 
 ask whether these apparently lifeless 
 dogmas and symbols do not, after all, 
 stand for living realities, and whether 
 some of them at least are not the 
 very best expression we can have for 
 such realities. 
 
 TO take the most primal of re- 
 ligious conceptions, the idea 
 of a Supreme Being. The modern 
 thinker prefers to characterise it by 
 some cold and clumsy circumlocution, 
 to speak of the Great Unknown and 
 Unknowable, of the Power not our- 
 selves that makes for Righteousness, or 
 maybe simply of Nature : all phrases 
 which fail to include the most essen- 
 tial quality of the conception they 
 attempt to express, namely, its aw- 
 ful and mysterious majesty. It can- 
 not be doubted that the one English 
 word for that conception must ever 
 be simply God. No new word, 
 however skilfully chosen, can ever 
 equal the word God, polarised as it 
 is by centuries of religious usage.
 
 a Literary 
 
 75 
 
 To use any other is deliberately 
 to use a weaker one without any 
 difference whatever in the concep- 
 tion. The modern man doubtless 
 prefers to speak of Nature from a de- 
 sire to escape anthropomorphism, but 
 the desire is vain. Already even those 
 colourless phrases I have mentioned 
 begin to take on a human aspect, for 
 so soon as a word is capitalised per- 
 sonification is not far away. 
 
 BUT the value of dogma and 
 symbolism can be more con- 
 vincingly illustrated in regard to con- 
 ceptions less remote and therefore 
 more profitable. ' Each great Catholic 
 Dogma,' says Mr. Patmore, 'is the 
 key, and the only key, to some great 
 mystery, or series of mysteries, in 
 humanity.' One may prefer the 
 word ' Christian ' for ' Catholic/ and 
 be disposed to qualify the exclu- 
 sive nature of the statement, but 
 any one who has had any spiritual 
 (or should one say psychological?) 
 experience knows it to be virtually 
 true. Much Christian symbolism is 
 doubtless entirely fanciful, but the 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 SYMBOL- 
 
 ISM 
 
 Mr. Pat- 
 more 's 
 Religio 
 
 Poetae.'
 
 7 6 
 
 Cfje Heltgion of 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 The Reality 
 of 'Conver- 
 
 The Mother 
 and Child. 
 
 great central symbols are as ex- 
 actly records of fact as any proven 
 scientific proposition. The dogma 
 of Conversion, the New Birth, for 
 example, is no mere figure of mys- 
 ticism, but a psychological fact daily 
 illustrated in the lives of thousands 
 of persons. The change is not neces- 
 sarily brought about by confessedly 
 religious agencies, most frequently it 
 comes of the mysterious workings of 
 natural love, but by whatever chance 
 influence it is set in motion, the fact 
 of its daily occurrence is undeniable. 
 A man is a brute to-day, and in a 
 week's time, without any apparent 
 cause, he is seen to be undergoing a 
 mystical change ; a new light is in 
 his face, and he is in every way a 
 new creature. This is no invention 
 of Christianity, but simply a natural 
 process which Christianity has in- 
 cluded in its body of spiritual doctrine. 
 In like manner it has embodied the 
 natural sacrament of motherhood in 
 the divine symbol of the Mother and 
 Child though by the addition of the 
 arbitrary dogma of the Immaculate 
 Conception it has implied an indig-
 
 a Literary 
 
 77 
 
 nity towards the ' natural ' process of 
 child-bearing of which the churching 
 of women is an unworthy expression. 
 What indeed is religion but a syn- 
 thesis of the natural sacraments of life? 
 
 WHAT also is the dogma that 
 man cannot be ' saved ' of 
 himself but a recognition of the 
 obvious fact that he did not make 
 himself, and the resulting dogma of 
 Grace but a more impressive way of 
 stating man's entire dependence for 
 his gifts and his fortunes on a power 
 beyond his own control ? 
 
 AGAIN, the old theological fight- 
 ing dogma that man is ' saved ' 
 by faith and not by works is seen to 
 be a most important truth when we 
 reflect that good works may be done 
 from the worst of motives, and that, 
 moreover, among the faithful they 
 must always depend on the means at 
 their control. 
 
 THEN certain methods of Chris- 
 tianity, such for example as 
 prayer, are undeniably based on deep 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 Grace. 
 
 Faith and 
 Works. 
 
 Prayer.
 
 Cjje Eeligton of 
 
 DOGMA 
 AND 
 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 ' Natural ' 
 Prayer. 
 
 needs of the human creature. That 
 it is an intellectual delusion to think 
 that a supernal power sits listening 
 to the verbal cry of our often trivial 
 petitions, that so far as hearing in the 
 customary sense of aural communica- 
 tion is concerned we might as well 
 go pray to the rocks and trees, is no 
 criticism of the central truth of 
 ' prayer,' which I take to be a humble 
 and yet exalted attitude of the spirit, 
 in which man is put en rapport with 
 certain spiritual forces, just as certain 
 states of bodily health make him 
 more sensitive to invigorating climatic 
 conditions, and the reverse. Man 
 grows in prayer, as a plant grows in 
 its blind yearnings towards the sun. 
 
 "TT^HERE are many for whom the 
 JL verbal visible act of prayer is 
 unnecessary, natures, so to say, which 
 can fly without wings. They are so 
 possessed by the spirit of prayer, that 
 all day long their eyes are meeting 
 with objects which awaken it, send- 
 ing their worshipping aspirations 
 soaring aloft, like white birds flying 
 towards a beautiful light. A fair
 
 a iliterarp 
 
 79 
 
 face, a liberating prospect, some 
 perfect wonder of art ; these and a 
 thousand other chance encounters of 
 beauty, are enough to put them, meta- 
 phorically, on their knees. Others, 
 probably still the majority, cannot 
 attain that pinnacle of aspiration save 
 by the scaffolding of words and out- 
 ward forms, yet so long as they have 
 attained it, what matter how they 
 did so ? The spirit of prayer like 
 that of imagination is awakened in 
 different persons by different objects. 
 Some need such traditional symbols 
 as the Madonna and the Crucifix to 
 inspire it, others again find such 
 symbols, from the very fact of their 
 long familiarising usage, void of ap- 
 peal. Their virtue has gone out of 
 them. Unfortunately it is in the 
 nature of symbols either to wear out, 
 or to become mere idols. A change 
 of symbols is one of those needs of 
 humanity that the Christian Church 
 has not recognised. 
 
 AND here we come to the central 
 mistake which has lessened the 
 power even of such of her symbols 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 
 SYMBOL 
 
 ISM 
 
 The Limita- 
 tions of 
 Christain 
 Symbolism.
 
 So 
 
 Cfje Eeligion of 
 
 DOGMA 
 AND 
 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 Pan and 
 
 Christ have 
 
 both a place 
 
 in the 
 
 human 
 
 Pantheon. 
 
 as are of actual truth and universal 
 application : the mistake of fencing 
 off certain symbols within a sacred 
 enclosure, and saying ' these only are 
 holy,' instead of recognising that 
 everything moved by the breath of life 
 is sacred and symbolic. In this re- 
 spect such a book as Whitman's Leaves 
 of Grass is more helpful than TJie 
 New Testament for it includes more. 
 With our growing sensitiveness to 
 the wonder of life, we are aware that 
 there are great and beautiful pre- 
 sences in it to which in Christian 
 dogma we find no reference, and for 
 the embodiment of which we have to 
 turn say to the Greek mythology, 
 and to such figures as Pan, Aphro- 
 dite, and Apollo. Neither are these 
 gods dead, nor is there actually any 
 strife between them and the sadder 
 figure of the Galilean. All the gods 
 of all the creeds supplement or cor- 
 roborate each other. One nation 
 has been gifted with intuitions of 
 certain sacred aspects of life, another 
 with others. The Greek's joy in 
 natural life is a good thing, but the 
 Galilean's message of its subordination
 
 a literarp 
 
 to the spiritual life was no less a 
 necessary truth. Enabled as we 
 are by our modern historic sense to 
 gaze back over the whole course of 
 the river of time, we should be able 
 calmly to realise that every age has 
 made its contribution to the fabric 
 of religion : that no so-called dream 
 which has drawn upward the mind of 
 man has been without its spring in 
 some appealing need of his spirit, no 
 strange flower of ' delusion ' but has 
 borne within it the seed of some 
 exalting ideal. 
 
 IT is perhaps idle to speak of the 
 future, for the future no more 
 than the present can present a uni- 
 formity of religious doctrine. The 
 old systems will, of course, continue 
 side by side with the new ones, so 
 long as temperaments survive that 
 are in need of them. By the ' future ' 
 one rather means the tendencies of 
 the more actively religious of man- 
 kind. Such have long since felt the 
 need of a more universal symbolism, 
 one less based on provincial historical 
 associations than much of the sym- 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 
 SYMBOL- 
 
 ISM 
 
 The 
 Religion 
 
 of the 
 Future.
 
 82 
 
 Religion of 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 Mr. Nor- 
 man Gale's 
 'A Country 
 Muse.' 
 
 holism of Christianity. Many such, 
 of course, have gone out already 
 from the old church : some for the 
 reason that their intellectual faculties 
 are more alert than their spiritual 
 with the result that not only do they 
 deny the efficacy of church symbolism, 
 but deny also the spiritual facts which 
 for others remain after intellectual 
 criticism has done its worst. These 
 latter, again, finding their spiritual in- 
 tuitions hampered rather than helped 
 by organised systems of dogma and 
 rite, will probably continue more and 
 more to find their symbols in the 
 aspects of nature and the creations of 
 art ; ' content,' like Mr. Norman Gale, 
 
 ' to know that God is great, 
 And Lord of fish and fowl, of air and sea 
 Some little points are misty. Let them wait.' 
 
 The recent popular developments 
 of the study of music, painting, 
 and literature are undoubtedly due 
 in great measure to the homeless 
 religious spirit having taken refuge 
 in those and kindred arts with 
 Browning and Ruskin societies, Ibsen 
 theatres, Wagner revivals, and Burne 
 Jones exhibitions for its sometimes
 
 a Literarp 
 
 grotesque manifestations. The great 
 
 dogmas of the religion of the future 
 
 will be Love, Beauty, Purity, and 
 
 Strength and the artist 
 
 will be its priest. 
 
 DOGMA 
 
 AND 
 SYMBOL- 
 ISM 
 
 IX 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SENSES 
 
 TO speak of natural religious 
 senses will seem redundant to 
 any one familiarised with the obvious 
 idea that everything that exists, re- 
 ligion included, is ' natural,' that : 
 
 ' . . . Nature is made better by no mean, 
 But Nature makes that mean : over that 
 
 art 
 
 Which you say adds to Nature, is an art 
 That Nature makes.' 
 
 But one has been so brought up to 
 regard religion as something super- 
 imposed upon our human nature, 
 rather than something blossoming 
 out of it, that the habit clings. Re- 
 ligion, we are accustomed to think, 
 is an accomplishment taught in 
 
 ' Natural ' 
 
 Religious 
 
 Senses.
 
 8 4 
 
 Cfte Eeligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 The 
 
 Spiritual 
 Sense. 
 
 schools, like algebra, an ' optional ' 
 subject indeed, and we may, if we 
 will, learn drawing instead. To think 
 of religion as a natural function like 
 seeing, eating, or sleeping, would 
 seem to perplex many people, who, 
 indeed, would be at a loss how to be 
 religious without church and prayer- 
 book. To abolish all the churches 
 and to make a bonfire of prayer- 
 books would be a sure way to discover 
 the truly religious. 
 
 I HAVE already spoken of the 
 Spiritual Sense. By it I mean 
 an attribute of mind which qualifies 
 certain people to apprehend what we 
 call spiritual matters better than other 
 people without that attribute. And 
 one can illustrate it by any of the 
 other senses the Sense of Beauty, 
 for instance. We generally admit 
 that certain people have a sense of 
 beauty, while others have not, or have 
 it in but an elementary degree. We 
 behold one man standing before a 
 Whistler, with face irradiated as in 
 the presence of the beatific vision. 
 To his neighbour it is as though he
 
 a Ltterarp 
 
 saw a spirit ; and, indeed, what the 
 one man sees is as invisible to the 
 other as though it were a spirit ' Do 
 you see nothing there ? ' exclaims the 
 Whistlerian. ' Nothing at all,' answers 
 the Philistine, over-confident, 'yet all 
 that is I see.' But there the Philis- 
 tine is wrong. He evidently does 
 not see all that is. He is not artis- 
 tically clairvoyant. And so in the 
 case of the person gifted with the 
 Spiritual Sense. He has strong in- 
 tuitions of the love of God and the 
 sanctity and blessedness of exist- 
 ence. The unspiritual person has 
 not these visions. Instead of learn- 
 ing from the other, he denies them : 
 yet his denial is none the less ignor- 
 ance, limitation of understanding. In 
 matters of this kind no number of 
 negatives are equal to one affirmative. 
 
 THE Spiritual Sense, the primary 
 of all the religious senses, 
 the gift, so to say, of spiritual clair- 
 voyance, of looking beyond matter 
 to the mysteries for which it seems 
 to stand, may belong, indeed most 
 frequently belongs, to what we call 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 ' Simple 
 People.'
 
 86 
 
 Cfre Heltgton of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 simple people : people quite without 
 so-called ' culture ' and ' refinement,' 
 and 'the finer feelings.' It is not 
 seldom found, in ludicrous forms 
 maybe, in small country chapels, 
 and the sympathetic may find it con- 
 stantly among members of the Salva- 
 tion Army. I know a ' Captain,' an 
 out-door porter, earning less than a 
 pound a week, at my country station, 
 who has more spirituality in his little 
 finger than many a Church dignitary 
 in his whole body. To watch his face 
 when he is talking of his conversion, 
 quite apart from what he may be say- 
 ing (which, indeed, only differs from 
 your own feelings in its terminology), 
 is a Church Festival, an Apocalypse, 
 an apparition of the Divine in this 
 dusty, work-a-day world. I have met 
 one of his railway directors, but he 
 was not half so interesting. 
 
 Shepherds, out-of-door ' natural 
 persons,' as Whitman calls them, 
 lighthouse men, men living close to 
 the elements, most lonely men, are at 
 bottom intensely religious. The club 
 man may, as a rule, be taken as their 
 antithesis. It is not the clever, but
 
 a Literarp 
 
 the simple, who inherit the mysteries. 
 ' Woe is me ! Woe is me ! ' exclaimed 
 an old Schoolman, 'thesimple brethren 
 are entering heaven, and the learned 
 ones are debating if there be one.' 
 
 But in addition to this spiritual 
 sense the religious sense, par excel- 
 lence there are other senses which in 
 various ways, and to various degrees, 
 may be described as tributaries of it : 
 such as the Sense of Wonder, the 
 Sense of Beauty, the Sense of Pity, 
 the Sense of Humour, the Sense of 
 Gratitude. 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 'THHE Sense of Wonder is obvi- 
 _L ously nearest to that spirit of 
 worship which is the first instinct of 
 religion, and Science is here seen to 
 have been one of the truest friends 
 of religion, for her discoveries must 
 have quickened the sense of wonder 
 in many whom the everyday marvels 
 of life leave unmoved. The majority 
 of mankind cannot conceive the ac- 
 customed as wonderful, and the sense 
 of wonder is really least in that gap- 
 ing populace which, at first sight, 
 may seem to have most of it. They 
 
 The Sense 
 of Wonder.
 
 88 
 
 Cj)e Ecligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 are incapable of realising the wonder 
 of laws, and are only moved by that 
 of aberrations. It needs a comet to 
 arouse their sense of astronomical 
 mysteries. The loveliest fixed star 
 shines for them in vain, merely be- 
 cause it is 'fixed' and they have 
 seen it before. Monstrosities, ' novel- 
 ties,' ' accidents,' ' miracles,' are their 
 stimulants. In an average six-foot 
 man they see nothing to marvel at, 
 but a 'Chinese giant' of eight feet 
 they will pay much to see. Hence 
 Madame Tussaud's and the Catholic 
 Church. It is to be feared that 
 Madame Tussaud's stimulates but 
 little the sense of the higher mysteries 
 of existence ; yet, at the same time, 
 wherever we have the sense of wonder, 
 in however gross a form, we have one 
 of the germs of that spiritual insight 
 which sees the world and the most 
 'everyday' fact in it bathed in that 
 strange light which for some is never 
 gone from sea or land. Any one with 
 the sense of wonder must be to some 
 extent religious, must be emanci- 
 pated in some measure from the dull 
 materialism of his fellows.
 
 a Literary 
 
 . 8 9 
 
 Sense of Beauty, however, 
 J. is not necessarily a religious 
 sense save in so far as it gives birth 
 to the sense of wonder, of love, of 
 gratitude. Curiously enough, in our 
 own day, among what we call deca- 
 dent artists, we find its influence not, 
 as one would have expected, as a 
 spiritualising, but as a materialis- 
 ing, an actually degrading, influence. 
 Even when, as I make bold to say of 
 its worst forms, decadent art is not 
 merely the expression of moral men- 
 tal and spiritual disease, lusts that 
 dare no other operation finding vent 
 in pictorial and literary symbolism, 
 even when it retains a certain inno- 
 cence and health, it does its best to 
 limit its appeal to what we call the 
 sensual faculties. It merely addresses 
 the sensual eye and ear the more ob- 
 viously, and endeavours desperately 
 to limit beauty to form and colour, 
 scornfully ignoring the higher sensi- 
 bilities of heart and spirit. The ideal 
 of the decadent artist is the cuisine. 
 The appreciation he expects is no dif- 
 ferent in kind, and little in degree, from 
 that we give to a choice dish or a new 
 
 M 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 The Sense 
 of Beauty. 
 
 Its de- 
 gradation 
 in ' Decad- 
 ent ' Art.
 
 9 o 
 
 Cfce Heligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 ' Decad- 
 ence ' 
 
 mainly a 
 lisregard of 
 proportion 
 
 liqueur. The spirit, the heart, the 
 intellect cannot be said to take part 
 in the appreciation of the most ex- 
 quisite cookery ; and similarly there 
 is nothing for the spirit, the heart, or 
 the intellect in the specially 'modern' 
 decadent art. 
 
 THIS decadence is simply the re- 
 sult of that modern disregard 
 of proportion of which I shall have 
 to speak again. It would almost 
 seem that the relative spirit has car- 
 ried us so far that we have come 
 to deny not only ultimates, but re- 
 lations also. Decadence is founded 
 on a natural impossibility to start 
 with. It attempts the delineation of 
 certain things and aspects in vacua, 
 isolated from all their relations to 
 other things and their dependence 
 on the great laws of life. Its posi- 
 tion is as absurd as that of an artist 
 who should say : I will paint this 
 figure in but two dimensions, and 
 will give it no length ; or one who 
 would say : I will paint this summer 
 landscape, but omit all reference to 
 sunlight. So hardly less vainly does
 
 a JLiterarp 
 
 the decadent attempt to ignore cer- 
 tain conditions of his theme, which, 
 actually, it is impossible to ignore. 
 To take that unsavoury example of 
 the prismatic hues of corruption, 
 taught us by Baudelaire. It is per- 
 fectly true, of course, that a decaying 
 body manifests certain beauties of 
 colour, but to enjoy them to the full 
 one needs first of all to suspend one's 
 sense of smell to hold one's nose, 
 in short. So it is with many pro- 
 ducts of modern art. To enjoy them 
 with any pleasure you have, in one 
 way or another, to hold your nose. 
 They may appeal to one sense of 
 beauty, but they offend others ; for 
 surely it is a mistake to assume that 
 the sense of beauty is one, a mere 
 sensibility of eye and ear. May not 
 smell even be, so to say, an olfactory 
 sense of beauty ! What many speak 
 of as a sense of beauty is merely a 
 sense of colour and form, and it were 
 well enough if the impressions of 
 objects were confined to colour and 
 form but, need one say, they are not, 
 but go much deeper. Moral beauty 
 and spiritual beauty are not mere 
 
 THE RE- 
 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 Limited 
 Definitions 
 
 of the 
 Sense of 
 Beauty. 
 
 Beauty 
 more than 
 Form and 
 
 Colour.
 
 Cbe Beltgton of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 metaphors ; and a picture or a book 
 which, whatever its appeal to our 
 sense of form and colour, violates the 
 sanctities of life or ignores any of its 
 conditions, is not, properly speaking, 
 a thing of beauty, a work of art. 
 
 NOT, of course, that I mean for 
 a moment that art must be 
 definitely moral or didactic. It has 
 nothing to do with morals only, so 
 to say, with spirituals. Many people 
 seem to confuse the moral and the 
 spiritual. As a matter of fact the 
 spiritual must often of necessity be 
 the immoral. A man's subject may be 
 as so-called ' immoral ' as he pleases 
 so that he is able to treat it spiritu- 
 ally, or shall we say symbolically, in 
 its relation to the whole of life. 
 
 But supposing beauty to be, as cer- 
 tain modern artists say, merely a mat- 
 ter of form and colour, is it not logical 
 that the artist should confine himself 
 for his themes to objects which have, 
 or at least suggest, nothing but form or 
 colour if such are to be found ? One 
 is ready to admit that the whole mys- 
 tery of life, ' the pathos of eternity,' is
 
 a Literarp 
 
 93 
 
 to be found in a curve. Colour in itself 
 is a mystery, and are there not trance- 
 like moments when suddenly we ask 
 ourselves, why a coloured world, why 
 a blue sky, and green grass, why not 
 vice-versa, or why any colour at all ? 
 
 BUT the difficulty is that when an 
 artist paints men and women, he 
 paints objects which imply more than 
 form and colour, implications that it 
 is impossible to escape or elude. The 
 artist may answer that he is able to 
 elude them. To him, as it appears his 
 mother is to Mr. Whistler, a man is 
 simply an arrangement of form and 
 colour. He is able to paint pain with- 
 out pity and foulness without repulsion. 
 Yet though he be able to achieve this 
 detachment from humanity, this ab- 
 sorption in paint, his brush will have 
 proved itself more sensitive, and have 
 thwarted the artist's narrowness of 
 intention. In spite of himself he 
 will have painted a man, though he 
 may persist in calling his picture an 
 arrangement. In the empire of life, art 
 is but a province, and, like the artist, is 
 subject to greater laws than its own. 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 Men and 
 
 Women 
 
 imply more 
 
 than Form 
 
 and Colour. 
 
 Art subject 
 to greater 
 laws than 
 its own.
 
 94 
 
 CJ)e Eeitgion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 The Sense 
 
 of Pity 
 
 often 
 
 deadened 
 
 by the 
 
 Sense of 
 
 Beauty. 
 
 WE may conclude, then, that the 
 sense of beauty is not neces- 
 sarily a religious force, but that in so 
 far as it tends to materialism and in- 
 humanity it may be a potent anti-reli- 
 gious one. It is from a perception of 
 these dangers that religious teachers 
 have so often been antagonistic to art. 
 On the other hand, that it may be 
 a religious force of no less power, in 
 so far as it impresses us with a sense 
 of the sacred significance of life, is 
 equally plain. 
 
 A NOTHER religious sense which, 
 xA. we have just hinted, the sense of 
 beauty does not seem to stimulate, is 
 the sense of pity, bound up as it is 
 with the conception of self-sacrifice. 
 The person whose sense of beauty is 
 extremely developed is apt to be some- 
 what cruel in his attitude towards 
 those who do not arouse his favourite 
 sense. To be plain, with him, is to 
 be despised; 'to be fat' literally, as 
 with Falstaff, 'to be hated.' He 
 cares for nothing but fair and dis- 
 tinguished persons and things. He 
 has little or no appreciation of char-
 
 a Utterarp apan 
 
 95 
 
 acter or virtue. In short, he is selfish, 
 and in a great measure inhuman, as 
 it is the tendency of all purely sen- 
 suous pleasures to make men. Yet 
 the sense of pity remains the divinest 
 of all human gifts, and he who has it 
 not indeed provokes it. It is by pity 
 that the strong give of their strength 
 to the weak, the happy to some 
 extent bring compensation to the 
 wretched : pity is nature's correlative 
 for pain, the gentle equaliser of life's 
 cruel inequalities. 
 
 I HAVE heard it asked by cynical 
 young men, who imagine that re- 
 ligion is at an end because they have 
 none themselves : But why should I 
 live for others ? Where is this law of 
 love in nature ? Where, one might ask, 
 is it not ? Nor could a question more 
 completely illustrate the anarchy of 
 thought which is at the bottom of 
 many of our ' present discontents.' 
 The conception of self-sacrifice is, of 
 course, no invention of Christ, or any 
 one teacher : it is the inevitable out- 
 come of social existence. It com- 
 menced long ago when barbaric man 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 Why should 
 I live for 
 others ?
 
 9 6 
 
 CJjc Eeligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 Unselfish- 
 ness an 
 inherent 
 condition of 
 Society. 
 
 The birth 
 of an Ideal. 
 
 first realised that, if he and his fellows 
 were to live together in any comfort, 
 it could only be on some basis of give 
 and take. To live absolutely each 
 man for himself could not be possible 
 if all were to live together. In course 
 of time, in addition to the utility, 
 certain more sensitive individuals 
 began to see a charm, a beauty, in this 
 consideration for others. Gradually a 
 sort of sanctity attached to it, and 
 Nature had once more illustrated her 
 mysterious method of evolving from 
 rough and even savage necessities 
 her lovely shapes and her tender 
 dreams. To assert, then, with some 
 recent critics of Christianity, that that 
 law of brotherly love which *is its 
 central teaching is impracticable of 
 application to the needs of society, is 
 simply to deny the very first law by 
 which society exists. 
 
 Self-sacrifice is no ideal dream of 
 a gentle soul, it is seen to be a con- 
 dition of man's happiness evolved by 
 Nature for herself out of the depths of 
 her own rough heart ; and if from the 
 stern strife of conflicting needs so fair 
 a flower has come, how true seems
 
 a Literary 
 
 the intuition of the mystic that God 
 Himself may, after all, be Love. 
 
 I HAVE spoken of another sense 
 not usually associated with re- 
 ligion. The sense of humour has 
 often indeed seemed an anti-re- 
 ligious force. It has ridiculed the 
 eccentricities of the pious, the in- 
 sincerities of the devout, the soul of 
 evil in things good. It has all along 
 been the candid friend of religion. 
 Therein, of course, it has done real 
 service. In our own day we have seen 
 it, in the hands of certain witty 
 paradoxers, do more to hasten the 
 disintegration of narrow religious 
 conventions than all the German 
 commentators together. But it is 
 now time for these gentlemen to 
 stop. They seem in danger of going 
 too far, of confusing the true and false 
 together. Recent humour begins 
 almost to imply that goodness in 
 itself is ridiculous, and it would seem 
 really to believe its own witticism 
 that ' a colour-sense is more important 
 than the Fear of God.' In fact, our 
 humour, like our art, has, for the 
 
 N 
 
 97 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 The Sense 
 of Humour.
 
 C6e iReligion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 The ' New 
 Humour.' 
 
 Proportion 
 
 the vital 
 
 principle of 
 
 Humour. 
 
 present, lost its humanity. And what 
 is humour if not the staunchest of 
 humanists ? Yet the ' new humorist ' 
 is the bitterest, most uncomfortable, 
 creature that crawls the planet. 
 Kindness is surely the soul of hum- 
 our ; but for it we have substituted a 
 biting cynicism, cruel as the east wind. 
 Our humour is indeed anaemic with 
 over refinement. It cringes too 
 daintily from ' the Philistine ' and 
 ' the bourgeois ' ever to be good 
 fun. We might indeed define 'the 
 New Humour ' as ' the Ill-natured 
 Remarks of the Superior Person.' 
 
 MOREOVER, it is in equal 
 danger on another hand. 
 Like art, it is failing to ob- 
 serve that proportion which is in- 
 deed its vital principle. It laughs, 
 or rather sneers, at everything in- 
 discriminately, and when humour 
 does that it is near its end. It 
 observes no reticences, respects no 
 sensibilities, reveres no sanctities. 
 In the two words, Ill-nature and 
 Sacrilege, we have it all. It is mainly 
 responsible for that lack of reverence
 
 a mterarp 
 
 99 
 
 which is one of the most depressing 
 features of the time. Till it recog- 
 nises its proper place in the scheme 
 of existence, remembers once again 
 that there are holy things in life 
 which it must not approach, beauti- 
 ful things it must not degrade, sad 
 things for which it once had tears it 
 is no longer a friend, but one of the 
 worst enemies of man. 
 
 THERE 
 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES. 
 
 The proper 
 Limits of 
 Humour. 
 
 sense of humour of which I 
 -L was thinking as an ally of re- 
 ligion was more on the old pattern. 
 I was thinking especially of that very 
 essential gift which it seems to have 
 lost awhile, the perception of dispro- 
 portion. Granted this gift, there 
 seems to me no action of the mind 
 fitter to induce in man that attitude 
 of humility which is one of the first 
 principles' of religion. It exults in 
 the constant appreciation of contrasts, 
 often invisible to other eyes. It sees 
 human life vain and swaggering, boast- 
 ing itself of its glory and power like a 
 Nebuchadnezzar, and it turns its eyes 
 upon the fixed stars, which have seen 
 so many Nebuchadnezzars, and it 
 
 Humour 
 the parent 
 of Humility 
 
 The Tears 
 of Humour.
 
 IOO 
 
 Cfje HeHgton of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 The 
 
 Selfishness, 
 
 Misery ,and 
 
 Tragedy of 
 
 Life largely 
 
 due to a 
 
 Lack of 
 
 Humour. 
 
 smiles, but a tear steals into its 
 smile. 
 
 THERE is no power in man 
 more fitted to produce social 
 harmony, to slay the devil of self, 
 than the sense of humour. What 
 makes a great part of the misery 
 of life but our pretence of caring 
 for certain baubles more than we 
 really do, or at least should, given a 
 sense of humour? Most tragedies 
 arise entirely from a lack of humour. 
 When we are jealous and passion- 
 ate, the sense of humour would teach 
 us to stop and consider. When 
 we elbow and hustle, the sense of 
 humour as well as the sense of 
 charity would teach us to give way. 
 Is your heart set on this particular 
 coral and bells? You would say 
 to those who would surpass you in 
 some petty way, who would sit in a 
 better place than you, or otherwise 
 wear feathers in the cap. Well, evi- 
 dently your necessity is greater than 
 mine ; take it ! And, instead of tear- 
 ing each other, you both part happy, 
 he happy with it, you still happier
 
 a Utterarp 
 
 101 
 
 without it Humour, then, is a religi- 
 ous force in that it discounts fictitious 
 values, and minimises the petty rival- 
 ries of existence. 1 
 
 BUT more than any other sense 
 at all, we need one which 
 Epictetus was constantly preaching 
 as the great need of man, ever so 
 long ago ; simply ' a grateful disposi- 
 tion,' the sense of gratitude. There 
 
 1 After writing these remarks on humour as a 
 religious force I was pleased to find the following 
 confirmatory passage in some beautiful meditations 
 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, entitled Com- 
 munings of a Day : ' But to deliver sympathy 
 from taint of sickliness, to relieve strong self-dis- 
 cipline of outward harshness, to give character 
 effectiveness, to show the true naturalness of the 
 supernatural element in Christian character, we 
 do need that quality which has been well described 
 as " often touching us into vitality, when sweetness 
 alone would cloy or sicken ; which helps us to see 
 ourselves as we are, and others as they desire to 
 be ; whose springs lie close to those of deepest 
 pathos ; which enters into the very essence of 
 wisdom, gives salt to love, and makes it strong 
 instead of sickly." In one word, we want in all 
 our life the touch of Humour. Character self- 
 discipline sympathy, all must have this salt of 
 Humour, or they will lose their savour. And "as 
 life goes on, we shall feel that it holds, in the 
 economy of the human spirit, a higher, brighter, 
 place than at first we at all recognised." ' 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 SENSES 
 
 The Sense 
 of Grati- 
 tude. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA' 
 
 r^ANTA BARBARA
 
 IO2 
 
 Cfje EeUgion of 
 
 THE RE- 
 LIGIOUS 
 
 SENSES 
 
 George 
 Borrow 
 and the 
 Dog- 
 fighter. 
 
 is little need to dilate upon that. 
 Perhaps nothing is so characteristic 
 of man as his lack of gratitude. It 
 shows deep in him from the beginning 
 of his existence, and we can but hope 
 that it is no more characteristic of 
 our own time than of any other. Man 
 forgot to say grace for his ' creation, 
 his preservation, and all the blessings 
 of this life/ at the beginning, and he 
 has gone on forgetting ever since, 
 charmingly taking all his good things 
 for granted, not a word about them, 
 but, should his little finger ache, 
 filling the welkin with his re- 
 sounding clamour against 
 the gods. 
 
 X 
 
 POSTSCRIPT 
 
 r ~PHE reader of George Borrow will 
 remember that amusing scene 
 where ' Lavengro ' pays a visit to a 
 fashionable cock-pit, and is introduced 
 to the illustrious high-priest of dog-
 
 a Literary 
 
 fighting. The world, said the impor- 
 tant doggy little man, was soon to 
 leave everything else and take to 
 dog-fighting. Lavengro, with the 
 ' greenness ' of a greater and simpler 
 mind, ventured in his innocence to 
 doubt it. Why, retorted the little 
 great man, what was there in life 
 a man would not give up for dog- 
 fighting ? Nai'vely answered Laven- 
 gro, 'There's religion.' How one 
 blushes for the innocent country-bred 
 youth, with his pathetic ignorance of 
 ' life,' so provincial, so unfashionable. 
 Yet, oddly enough, he was right. 
 Dog-fighting is no more, and religion 
 still makes shift to survive. 
 
 BUT in other guises, that dog- 
 fighter is still with us. His latest 
 evangel has been that of the demi- 
 monde and the music-hall. Soon, he 
 has prophesied, 'domesticity,' with 
 all its irksome restraints, shall be no 
 more. Repent, for a Walpurgis night 
 is at hand when men and women 
 shall once more run on all fours as 
 dogs, and revel in the offal of the 
 streets. O happy era of liberty, when 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 
 Evangel 
 of the 
 Demi- 
 monde and 
 the Music- 
 hall.
 
 104 
 
 Cfre Religion of 
 
 dent. 
 
 POST- the talon is free of the sheath for ever. 
 
 SCRIPT 
 
 and lust may run without his muzzle ; 
 when every one may be as indecent 
 The as his heart wishes, and he who loves 
 t ^ ie gutter may lie therein without 
 reproach ; when no man takes off the 
 hat to a woman or a church, but all 
 may wear it jauntily on one side, 
 through the length and breadth of 
 the land, may smoke and drink 
 unmoved before the sacred passion- 
 play of life, and expectorate with a 
 fine carelessness, none daring to make 
 them afraid ! Such is the dream of the 
 poor little sensual ' dog-fighter ' of 
 our days. Instead of dogs he sells us 
 beastly and silly novels, poetry he 
 dare not expose for sale at Farringdon 
 market, and pathetic ' advanced ' 
 science which runs thus : ' It is a sad 
 mission to cut through and destroy 
 with the scissors of analysis the deli- 
 cate and iridescent veils with which 
 our proud mediocrity clothes itself. 
 Very terrible is the religion of truth. 
 The physiologist is not afraid to re- 
 duce love to a play of stamens and 
 pistils, and thought to a molecular 
 movement. Even genius, the one
 
 a JLitetatp 
 
 105 
 
 human power before which we may 
 bow the knee without shame, has 
 been classed by not a few alienists 
 as on the confines of criminality, 
 one of the teratologic forms of the 
 human mind, a variety of insanity.' 
 But shall we despair of man's soul 
 because, forsooth! a Lombroso cannot 
 find it, of love because Paul Verlaine 
 is a satyr, of religion and law because 
 a mad poet fires his little pistol at 
 Westminster. I think not. What are 
 all these men but dirty children build- 
 ing their mud-pies, and soon oblivion, 
 like an indignant mother, shall send 
 them all to bed. 
 
 The spring of a new era is in the 
 air an era of faith. That prophesied 
 Walpurgis night is already behind us ; 
 and except in the imagination of a 
 handful of ill-conditioned writers, 
 artists, and ' thinkers,' who have 
 written and painted and 'thought,' 
 for each other, it never had even any 
 potential existence. 
 
 MODERN doubt' is very largely 
 a newspaper scare, with dis- 
 appointed journalists for its paid 
 
 O 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Lombroso 
 on ' the 
 Man of 
 Genius.' 
 
 ' Modern 
 
 doubt ' 
 
 largely a 
 
 Newspaper 
 
 scare.
 
 io6 
 
 EeUgion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 
 Census of 
 the Happy. 
 
 agitators, and were a census taken of 
 the happy people in this so-called age 
 of despair, the number would I fear be 
 shamefully large. One has only to go 
 to the seaside in the summer to see 
 how full the world is of unreflecting 
 gaiety. It contains, it is true, a small 
 percentage of shrill-voiced pessi- 
 mists, but it is far more made up of 
 excited golfers, joyous bathers, newly- 
 married couples, merry children, 
 brave and patient workers, busy 
 enthusiasts, and happy dreamers. 
 
 It is, doubtless, our duty to be un- 
 happy, as it is the duty of the British 
 workman to be discontented ; but 
 when did man ever do his duty? 
 Our very pessimists themselves in 
 course of time marry and beget 
 charming children, and for such des- 
 perate men make singularly gladsome 
 husbands and fathers. The world is 
 right not to heed its Cassandras. 
 Whatever its sorrows and its fears, it 
 has solid joys within reach of which 
 it knows the virtue, and of which no 
 weeping philosopher will ever be able 
 to rob it.
 
 a Literary 
 
 107 
 
 YET, in so far as modern doubt 
 and discontent do actually 
 exist, the secret of them is, to my 
 mind, entirely in man's intellectual 
 pride. The showy results of modern 
 science have flattered us into the idea 
 that, after all, man can by searching 
 find out God, that the riddle of the 
 universe is one which his mind is 
 capable of solving whereas it is a 
 riddle that can only be solved by 
 giving it up. To ' think ' less and 
 feel more is the one cure for ' modern 
 doubt.' 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Intellectual 
 Pride. 
 
 FOR has science actually brought 
 us one step nearer to the 
 primal mystery of things? It has 
 catalogued the minutiae of pheno- 
 mena, it has numbered the stars, 
 it has counted the grains of sand, 
 but has it told us a single truth 
 about the essence of these things, 
 the mysterious breath of life which 
 alone gives them significance? It 
 has indeed quickened and deepened 
 our sense of that mystery, but to say 
 that every new fact has made that 
 mystery more mysterious than ever is 
 
 Our debt 
 
 to Modern 
 
 Science.
 
 io8 
 
 C&e EeUgion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 Biologist or 
 the Poet 1 
 
 hardly the same as to say that it has 
 brought us nearer to an explanation. 
 Science can tell us that oxygen 
 and hydrogen will unite under certain 
 conditions to produce water, but it 
 cannot tell us why they do so : the 
 mystery of their affinity is as dark as 
 ever. It can tell us that a seed cast 
 into the earth has certain germinating 
 properties, by which it attracts to 
 itself the nutriment in the soil it 
 chances to need, and so on and so on, 
 but what is that but a more elaborate 
 way of stating the undoubted fact 
 that it grows. It explains nothing 
 of the miracle of the flower, nothing 
 of the strange influence of its beauty 
 on certain beholders. All the dia- 
 grams in the world cannot make one 
 a penny wiser concerning the sacred 
 mystery of motherhood. Yet the 
 midwife and the botanist and the 
 chemist all think they know. 
 
 WHICH comes nearest to the 
 truth about love poor Lom- 
 broso's talk about pistil and stamen, or 
 one of Shakespeare's sonnets ? There 
 is a certain type of man who always
 
 a Literarp 
 
 109 
 
 thinks it an explanation to point to 
 the root, as if the root was ever any 
 explanation of the flower and as if 
 roots themselves had not deeper roots, 
 and those roots had not roots again 
 deep in unfathomable eternity. If the 
 fine flower of spiritual love has its roots 
 in coarse and quaint physical facts, is 
 it not thus rather the more than the 
 less a mystery ? ' Is it not strange,' 
 asked Benedick, as Balthasar twanged 
 his guitar, ' that sheep's guts should 
 hale souls out of men's bodies ? ' 
 Strange indeed, but it is only the fool 
 that thinks ' sheep's guts ' an explana- 
 tion. This same type always thinks 
 he has explained a phenomenon when 
 he has called it ' physical,' as if the 
 body were any less a mystery than 
 the soul, which reminds one of 
 Blake's profound saying that, 'even 
 our digestion is governed by angels.' 
 
 PROCESSES are no explanation 
 of results. There is a point 
 where all the operating causes seen 
 working towards the given end are 
 suddenly lost sight of in the flash of 
 creation. ' Out of three sounds' the 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 ' Root ' 
 Fallacy. 
 
 The 
 
 Creative 
 ' Miracle.'
 
 I IO 
 
 C6e Beligion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Where 
 Science 
 ends Reli- 
 gion and 
 Poetry 
 begin. 
 
 musician frames ' not a fourth sound, 
 but a star.' It is likewise with the 
 writer and the painter. The critics 
 of both may analyse the subtle and 
 complex harmonies of words and 
 colours up to the very moment pre- 
 ceding creation, but the rapid syn- 
 thesis, ' the miracle,' which makes of 
 common dictionary words a line of 
 Keats, of pigments of earth and oil a 
 ' Gioconda ' to haunt the world for 
 ever, escapes them. How much more 
 so is it, then, with the master-artist 
 Nature ? That flower which Tenny- 
 son took from the crannied wall, 
 and threw down as a challenge to 
 men of science, still lies unattempted. 
 All the sciences together cannot tell 
 us properly what it ' is,' and certainly 
 all the sciences together cannot tell 
 us ' what God and man is.' They 
 tell us many small details ' about it 
 and about,' but of the one thing we 
 long most to hear, ' the miracle,' they 
 never have told, and probably never 
 can tell, a syllable. It is to the saint, 
 the mystic, and the poet, that we 
 must look for such knowledge.
 
 a Literary 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 
 Anthropo- 
 logist's 
 
 ' explana- 
 tion ' of 
 
 A NTHROPOLOGISTS have re- 
 jtjL cently been attacking religion 
 by methods similar to those employed 
 by biologists against love. By an 
 elaborate chain of deduction which 
 would make a theologian blush, they 
 have decided completely to their own 
 satisfaction that ancestor-worship and 
 such rude beginnings of religion ex- 
 plain all. Here again we have the 
 ' root ' fallacy. To say that the first 
 gropings of the religious instinct in 
 
 O Religion. 
 
 man took these rude forms does not 
 explain away the religious instinct. 
 To say that a spark leaps from the 
 impact of two flints does not explain 
 the mystery of fire. It is Nature's way 
 to produce her results by apparently 
 the most irrelevant and wrong-headed 
 means. Supposing that the anthropo- 
 logists are right, what does it matter ? 
 To show that religion as we now under- 
 stand it began as something very dif- 
 ferent, is no more argument against the 
 reality of religion than the fact that the 
 flower began as a root, the cousin of 
 dirt and worms, would be an argument 
 against the reality of the flower. How- 
 ever the religious instinct has evolved,
 
 112 
 
 &e HeUgion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Renan 
 
 Religion. 
 
 it is now a fact in the constitution of 
 man, a fact as assured as the organs of 
 digestion, and to ignore it is to be not 
 so much irreligious as unscientific. 
 
 ' T A religion,' wrote Renan in one 
 J / of his noblest outbursts, ' n'est 
 pas une erreur populaire ; c'est une 
 grande ve"rite d'instinct, entrevue par 
 le peuple, exprimee par le peuple. 
 Tous les symboles qui servent a 
 donner une forme au sentiment reli- 
 gieux sont incomplets, et leur sort 
 est d'etre rejete"s les uns apres les 
 autres. Mais rien n'est plus faux que 
 le reve de certaines personnes qui, 
 cherchant a concevoir 1'humanite par- 
 faite, la conoivent sans religion. C'est 
 1'inverse qu'il faut dire. . . . Suppo- 
 sons une humanite" dix fois plus forte 
 que la notre ; cette humanite'-la 
 serait infiniment plus religieuse.' 
 
 It is a strange thing that the very 
 men whose one dogma is ' evolution ' 
 should so persistently ignore the most 
 significant illustration of their own 
 great law. If man were once an ape, 
 there is all the more likelihood that 
 he will some day be an angel.
 
 a Jliterarp 
 
 N 
 
 O one less than the man of 
 science should need to be re- 
 minded that nothing comes into exist- 
 ence without an impelling need. If 
 the religious instinct had not thus 
 arisen, it would have died of atrophy 
 long ago, and so soon as it can be 
 proved a useless attribute man will 
 not be long in growing out of it. 
 The question is : Are there not im- 
 pressions borne in upon the soul of 
 man as he stands a spectator of the 
 universe which religion alone attempts 
 to formulate ? Certain impressions 
 are expressed by the sciences and the 
 arts. ' How wonderful ! ' exclaims 
 man and that is the dawn of science; 
 ' How beautiful ! ' and that is the 
 dawn of art But there is a still 
 higher, a more solemn, impression 
 borne in upon him, and, falling upon 
 his knees, he cries, ' How holy ! ' 
 That is the dawn of religion. The 
 all-pervading sanctity of life that is 
 the one message which, howsoever 
 encumbered by formulae and per- 
 verted by superstition, religion has 
 had to deliver. Maybe all those 
 formulae and superstitions have been 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 The 
 raison 
 
 the Re- 
 ligious 
 Instinct 
 
 The 
 
 Sanctity 
 of Life.
 
 H4 
 
 Cbe Religion of 
 
 POST- the necessary husks to protect the 
 SCRIPT . ., 
 
 precious seed across the ages ; but, 
 
 whether or no, the grateful, reverent 
 spirit will always remember, in deal- 
 ing with such, that it is from the ark 
 of the old church that the dove of the 
 Holy Spirit has flown. 
 
 The 
 
 Religion 
 of the 
 Spirit. 
 
 Joachim 
 leLyra. 
 
 OON maybe we shall need no 
 churches and no service-books ; 
 not in Jerusalem, nor in this moun- 
 tain, shall we worship the Father, 
 but unceremoniously in spirit and in 
 truth. ' The kingdom of the Father 
 has passed,' said an old mystic, ' the 
 kingdom of the Son is passing, the 
 kingdom of the Spirit is to come.' 
 As we look around us and see side by 
 side a growing disregard of the old 
 externals of religion, with an increas- 
 ingly passionate care for its informing 
 essence, may we not hope that the 
 era of the Spirit is at hand ? 
 
 Religion T3 ELIGION is the most ancient 
 
 the most f\ of the sc j ences> L^e every 
 
 ancient * 
 
 ofthe other science it has made its mis- 
 takeS) but essentially it has been 
 what cannot, perhaps, be said of any
 
 a JUterarp 
 
 other science right from the begin- 
 ning. Man has not waited to be 
 saved by biology any more than he 
 waited to be saved by Christianity. 
 There has always been more than 
 enough truth in the atmosphere for 
 the needs of the race. We are a 
 wondrously wise century, and with 
 the presumptuous certitude of youth 
 we decry the centuries that have 
 given us suck. Yet what have we 
 added to the sum of the world's 
 treasure compared with the ages 
 lying asleep in their graves ? The 
 very ideas over which we wax most 
 proud are merely applications of wis- 
 dom which the past has been preach- 
 ing for hundreds of years. What is 
 our boasted evolution but a corrobora- 
 tion of the intuitions of ancient Hin- 
 doo sages and poets ? and where has 
 our crowning dogma of democracy 
 come from if not from the republics 
 of Greece ? Our art confessedly is 
 imported from the past, and we can- 
 not even design a chair or build a 
 house without going a century back 
 for advice. And our books do we 
 read our own ? or have not our 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Our vast 
 
 debt to 
 
 the Past. 
 
 Our most 
 distinc- 
 tively 
 ' modern ' 
 Ideas. 
 
 Evolution. 
 
 Demo- 
 cracy. 
 
 Art. 
 
 Literature.
 
 n6 
 
 Cfre Eeiigion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 Religion. 
 
 libraries been written for us, from 
 ceiling to floor, by the dead ? We 
 turn our faces to the future as if there 
 lay our treasure, and the past, like an 
 old and faithful friend, stands un- 
 heeded at our side. But the wise 
 and the grateful soul is not so. He 
 lives in the constant thought that all 
 he is the past has made him, and he is 
 very tender to 'the old perfections 
 of the earth ' to borrow a beautiful 
 phrase of Lord De Tabley's. 
 
 And of religion this is truest of all. 
 The great prophets and saints belong 
 to the past. Their message is some- 
 times swaddled in antiquated ver- 
 biage, but we do not cast away our 
 old poets for that reason, and with 
 one as the other we have only to 
 translate them into the language of 
 our own time to find their message 
 true to-day as of old. As a modern 
 painter must learn from the old 
 masters, so must the modern reli- 
 gionist from his. Rather than decry 
 it because, forsooth, we are such great 
 biologists, let us go down on our knees 
 to the past, and beg with all our 
 prayers for one flash of its old radiant
 
 a Jliterarp 
 
 117 
 
 o 
 
 NE delusion indeed what we 
 call the modern thirst for 
 
 POST- 
 
 clear-seemg vision, its high calm 
 
 4. -4. i 1 i SCRIPT 
 
 wisdom, its stern duty, its loyal love. 
 
 The Cry 
 for a 
 
 ' Message. 
 
 knowledge has engendered in us : 
 that there is something new under 
 the sun ; that our doubts and diffi- 
 culties are new, and that our new 
 teachers must find us new answers. 
 The censors of modern literature are 
 continually crying aloud for a new 
 message. Where is the new prophet 
 who will give peace to our souls ? A 
 very short time ago Browning's was 
 the new message, Whitman's, Emer- 
 son's, Carlyle's, Ruskin's, Tennyson's. 
 Was ever age more rich in prophets 
 and in great messages? But what 
 have we done with them ? Have we 
 realised them in our lives, quite used 
 up every available particle of their 
 wisdom ? And yet here are we 
 hungry and clamouring again. The 
 truth is that the men who cry out for 
 new messages mean rather new sensa- 
 tions of doubt. It is not peace they 
 want, but fresh perplexity. 
 
 For peace is no new thing, any
 
 n8 
 
 Cbe iaeUgion of 
 
 POST- 
 SCRIPT 
 
 more than perplexity. There is no 
 quiddity of unbelief that is not to 
 be found in mouldering parchments 
 older than the religion of Christ. 
 There is no assurance of faith that 
 may ever be given us which has not 
 long ago tranquillised the souls of 
 forgotten saints. All the great men 
 are of one mind. Their message is 
 simple so simple that we put it by. 
 It seems so childish to our cultivated 
 intelligences to say Love God and 
 love one another. The old prophets 
 babbled that long ago. Yes, and 
 the prophets to come will but re- 
 peat the same message in other 
 forms. Truth always comes, as Christ 
 came, in the garb of absolute sim- 
 plicity. He seems a mere child or 
 peasant person. The learned doctors 
 will have none of Him. Love God 
 and love one another ! Is that all ? 
 That have we known from our 
 youth up. Yet is there 
 nothing else to say. 
 
 THE END
 
 a JLiterarp fl^an 119 
 
 ' BECAUSE thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed : 
 blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have 
 believed.' ST. JOHN XX. 29. 
 
 ' Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the 
 earth.' ST. MATTHEW v. 5. 
 
 ' This was thy daily task, to learn that man 
 Is small, and not forget that man is great.' 
 
 A. C. BENSON.
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE 
 Printers to Her Majesty
 
 THE BODLEY HEAD, 
 
 VIGO STREET, LONDON, W., 
 
 November 1893. 
 
 Books by Richard LeGallienne 
 
 The Student and the Body Snatcher 
 
 AND OTHER TRIFLES. 
 
 By ROBINSON K. LEATHER, M.A., and RICHARD LE 
 GALLIENNE. Royal i8mo, 33. net. 1890. 
 
 [A few remain, 
 
 The authors rightly describe the small sketches in this volume as ' trifles,' 
 but they are very clever trifles, reminiscent in some slight degree of the 
 work of Robert Louis Stevenson. REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 
 
 ... of great merit. The clever little sketches, short and few, inspire us 
 with a longing for more. They have a touch of Stevenson, and an 
 attraction defying analysis. PUBLISHERS' CIRCULAR. 
 
 . . . a dainty and delightful little volume. OBSERVER. 
 
 The contents are as startling as the name. The gruesome and the 
 tragic are the predominating elements in the short elusive sketches which 
 go to make up this curious effort in light literature ... of humour of a 
 fantastic sort there is also a considerable infusion. LITERARY WORLD. 
 
 %* Fifty copies on Large Paper, 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W. 
 Q
 
 Third Edition, Crown 8zw, cloth, $s. 6d. net. 
 
 George Meredith : Some Characteristics 
 
 By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. With a Bibliography (much 
 enlarged) by JOHN LANE : Portrait, and Illustration of the 
 novelist's Chalet. 1890. 
 
 All Meredithians must possess George Meredith ; Some Characteristics, 
 by Richard Le Gallienne. This book is a complete and excellent guide to 
 the novelist and the novels, a sort of Meredithian Bradsha-w, with pictures 
 of the traffic superintendent, and of the head office at Boxhill. Even Phili- 
 stines may be won over by the blandishments of Mr. Le Gallienne, from 
 whom I learn, by the way, that George Meredith is ' the Harvey of the 
 Ego,' and that he is not Adrian Harley. I hear, also, that 'daily, from 
 one quarter or another, come critical cuff and kick, to impress upon a numb 
 public the latest example of its immemorial purblindness." And the Baron 
 adds this cufflet to the rest. Mr. John Lane has added a Bibliography, 
 which is a model of minute industry. So here 's to the book of Richard and 
 John. ' The Baron de Book Worms' in PUNCH. 
 
 A very interesting and helpful book, likely to be agreeable to Mr. 
 Meredith's instructed admirers, and suggestive to many by whom his works 
 are misunderstood ... as appreciations merely, the essays are of a high 
 order of literary merit. The author's style has, indeed, been compared 
 with Mr. Meredith's own. But that is a criticism which in effect is unjust, 
 as it suggests the difficulties of Mr. Meredith's style rather than its merits. 
 Occasionally Mr. Le Gallienne lays himself open to the charge of being 
 fantastic . . . but his style is not obscure. It is an eager, sensitive, and 
 highly-figured style, somewhat of the aphoristic type. Much of what Mr. 
 Le Gallienne says is admirable, for its own sake, and so far as his subject is 
 concerned ... he is no unworthy guide. . . . The remarks on Meredith's 
 idea of comedy . . . will be particularly useful to many. . . . This critic 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.
 
 lays no less stress on his poetry, especially on ' Modern Love.' With the 
 exception of the latter, he surely overrates this part of Mr. Meredith's work. 
 The chapter, however, in which he discusses this is an interesting piece of 
 criticism, written with the fervour of an enthusiast ; yet not undiscriminat- 
 ing. And the concluding sentences are a striking example of his figurative 
 style. The Bibliography compiled hy Mr. Lane should be very useful. 
 
 VANITY FAIR. 
 
 Even in these days, when it is the doom of genius that thousands shall 
 read about a man's books for one who shall read the books themselves, few 
 of the dead and none of the living have been discussed, analysed, appre- 
 ciated, with the keenness of perception, the sympathetic receptivity, the 
 sensitive warmth, ' the love according to knowledge,' and the adequacy of 
 expression which distinguish this generous volume of characteristics. Mr. 
 Le Gallienne has, with almost microscopic insight, analysed the style and 
 aim, the intention and the methods, of one of the most powerful intellects, 
 and certainly the most original of our time. GLASGOW HERALD. 
 
 Second Edition, Crown 8vo, buckram, gilt top, $s. bd. net. 
 Transferred by the author to the present publishers 
 
 The Book-bills of Narcissus 
 
 AN ACCOUNT RENDERED BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. l8gi. 
 
 With all its digressions and appeals to the gentle reader, his book is a 
 study of character, a study of the spiritual growth and evolution of a poetic 
 young gentleman whose many charms proved irresistible with certain book- 
 sellers and other young persons. The portraiture is delicately wrought. 
 The pleasant touches of humour or pathos, the little strokes of irony, are so 
 blended that you cannot detect any positive evidence of moral judgment, 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.
 
 even when censure may seem to be implied. The whole record, in short, is 
 harmonised, and artist and work are as one. The deliberate quaintness of 
 style, as of a new Euphues, or a Euphues with something of the poetic 
 grace of the old and a manner that is his own, is in perfect agreement with 
 the theme. . . . Mr. Le Gallienne has achieved the end he had in view. 
 He has made the ' rose of Narcissus to bloom anew.' 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW, Article, ' Narcissus Poeticus,' Oct. 10, 1891. 
 
 If an unusually fine literary instinct could make a solid book, Mr. Le 
 Gallienne would be at no loss for an enduring reputation. . . . Nothing 
 can be prettier than his pleas and persuasions on behalf of Narcissus and 
 George Muncaster. . . . 
 
 'C. di B.' (Mr. Bernard Shaw) in THE STAR, Sept. 12, 1891. 
 
 The Narcissus, about whose life . . . we here learn a good deal, must 
 have been an agreeable companion. . . . His wayward moods, his innocent 
 love affairs, his wanderings, his readings, his culminating grand passion, 
 Mr. Le Gallienne renders his account of them all, and does it in a fresh 
 and breezy style which suits his pleasant subject admirably. There is a 
 special charm, too, about the graceful lyrics which sparkle here and there 
 in the pretty little volume. In fact, Mr. Le Gallienne is an artist. . . . 
 
 'The Baron's Assistant Reader,' PUNCH, Sept. 19, 1891. 
 
 Among the depressing brutalities which, on the one hand, are saluted as 
 the outpourings of unparalleled genius, and the Cockney vulgarities which, 
 on the other, are accepted as humour fit for innumerable editions, it is 
 pleasant to come upon a booklet so delicate, so artistic, and so fanciful as 
 'The Book-bills of Narcissus.' ... I quote the delightful songs which 
 George Muncaster sings to his children. . . . Happy Geoffrey, Owen, and 
 Phyllis, say I, to have such songs to wake them and lull them to sleep ! 
 
 ' R. C. L.' in ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS, Sept. 26, 1891 
 
 To have read a book through once delightedly and then to commence it 
 again is surely a test, be the reader who he may, of its interest, if not of its 
 worth. . . . The book is so good that it is too short. 
 
 REVIEW OF REVIEWS (with Portrait), Oct. 15, 1891. 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.
 
 ... he writes with ease and enjoys the dropping of the words, the dis- 
 tillation of the honey as it must seem to him, and occasionally he lights the 
 page with a fine perception of what makes gentle and lovely character . . . 
 a singular little confession, a very modern one, infantile modern ; but, above 
 all other things, it has frankness like that of youthful unconcern, only dimly 
 beginning to guess its own comedy. 
 
 THE NEW YORK NATION, ijth March 1892. 
 
 I wish I had space to tell you of the exquisite pages of ' The Book-bills 
 of Narcissus,' one of the swift successes of the London autumn ... I should 
 have thought the book too subtle, too delicate, too poetic, to have caught 
 so suddenly the public ear . . . you must read the book, those of you who 
 love what is loveliest, and you will know of what a poet's heart is made. 
 
 MRS. L. CHANDLER MOULTON in THE BOSTON HERALD, Dec. 20, 1891. 
 
 . . . the book is charmingly written, with a grace and flexibility of style 
 almost French, and a delicacy of touch very rarely to be found in modem 
 English Literature. THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE. 
 
 English Poems 
 
 By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. Second Edition, Crown 8vo. 
 53. net. 
 
 In ' ENGLISH POEMS' rhyme, rhythm, and diction are worthy of a writer 
 of ability and high ambition. THE ATHENAEUM. 
 
 The work of a singer of unmistakable power but of the sweetest temper. 
 . . . England will readily forgive Mr. Le Gallienne for singing 'beneath 
 the shadow of her name ' as long as he brings such gifts as these Poems, 
 and need not be ashamed to place him high among her poets . . . there is 
 abundance of imaginative force as well as delicate fancy . . . his volume 
 is a distinct enrichment of our literature. 
 
 PROFESSOR MINTO in the BOOKMAN. 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.
 
 There is plenty of accomplishment, there is abundance of tuneful notes, 
 sentiment often very pleasing, delicacy, grace. . . . The best thing in the 
 book, to one's own taste, is the last half of 'Sunset in the City. 1 'Paolo 
 and Francesca ' is very clever. 
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG in the NEW REVIEW. 
 
 Mr. Le Gallienne in his ' ENGLISH POEMS ' is fantastic after his own 
 fashion a fashion that is audacious, wayward, freakish, and very indi- 
 vidual. . . . Mr. Le Gallienne will carry you captive in a fine lyric rapture 
 to the very height of aspiration, and dash you to earth with some whimsical 
 turn or far-fetched conceit. . . . Most true, and deep, and touching is the 
 song when he is most simple in style and most direct and clear in expres_ 
 sion, as in the lyrical interludes in ' Cor Cordium' and ' Love Platonic.' 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 Mr. Le Gallienne is a poet of considerably wider range. . . . The 
 first three sections of the book, ' Paolo and Francesca,' ' Love Platonic,' 
 and 'Cor Cordium,' are apparently intended to contrast three phases of 
 sexual affection : passion overleaping social law, passion restrained by 
 social law, and passion sanctioned by social law. The trilogy is a good one, 
 and gives a point to the several sections which they could not have if 
 considered separately. . . . That on 'Love Platonic,' touching on the case 
 of two whose love is barred from its natural consummation by the prior 
 and unsatisfying marriage of one of them, is by far the best, and contains 
 some passages of great beauty and pathos. ' The Day of the Two Daffodils,' 
 ' Love's Poor,' 'A Lost Hour,' ' Regret,' ' Love Afar,' are poignant expres- 
 sions of different phases of an anguish which is, perhaps, the keenest of 
 which the human soul is capable ; and to say this is to say much. In 
 venturing to treat over again the story of Paolo and Francesca, in a 
 poem somewhat in the manner of Byron, the poet has been fairly successful, 
 and his versification is irreproachable. Of the remaining miscellaneous 
 poems, there are not many that impress us very much, except 'The 
 Decadent to his Soul,' which is a remarkable poem in regard to the idea 
 expressed in it the deliberate cultivation of the perception of holiness 
 only in order to give greater zest to sin. It is powerfully expressed, too, 
 but the idea is almost too horrible to gloat over in a poetic reverie. 
 EDINBURGH REVIEW, October 1893 
 
 Article ' Contemporary Poets and Versifiers, 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.
 
 Arthur Henry Hallam's Poetical Remains 
 
 WITH HIS ESSAY ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF MODERN POETRY AND ON THE LYRICAL POEMS 
 
 OF ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Reprinted from the ENGLISHMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1831. With 
 an Introductory Note by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 Printed by CONSTABLE, in Two Editions, viz. : 550 
 copies, fcap. 8vo, 53. net, and 50 copies on hand-made 
 paper, I2s. 6d. net. [A few remain. 
 
 %* Many of these Poems are of great Tennysonian interest, 
 having been addressed to Alfred, Charles, and Emily 
 Tennyson. 
 
 A dainty little volume which will be welcomed by all people of literary 
 taste. The genius of Tennyson has so glorified the inspirer of ' In 
 Memoriam' that everything done by Hallam has a real interest for 
 many. GLOBB. 
 
 An attractive little book with a sympathetic memorial introduction by 
 Mr. Le Gallienne. The poems afford many ' intimate glimpses ' of the 
 poet. SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 It was a good thought to reprint the book just now, and Mr. Le 
 Gallienne seems to be taking among younger authors the post held among 
 their seniors by Mr. Andrew Lang that of the editor par excellence, who 
 can always be relied upon to say something worth saying of his author and 
 to say it with grace and discretion. LITERARY WORLD. 
 
 LONDON : ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE, VIGO STREET, W.

 
 List of Books 
 
 m 
 
 Retires 
 
 1894 
 
 ttitions in 
 
 ALL BOOKS IN THIS CATALOGUE 
 ARE PUBLISHED AT NET PRICES 
 
 Telegraphic Address 
 ' BODLEIAN, LONDON
 
 ' A WORD must be said for the manner in which the publishers 
 ** have produced the volume (i.e. "The Earth Fiend"), a 
 sumptuous folio, printed by CONSTABLE, the etchings on Japanese 
 paper by MR. GOULDING. The volume should add not only to 
 MR. STRANG'S fame but to that of MESSRS. ELKIN MATHEWS AND 
 JOHN LANE, who are rapidly gaining distinction for their beautiful 
 editions of belles-lettres. ' Daily Chronicle, Sept. 24, 1892. 
 
 Referring to MR. LE GALLIENNE'S ' English Poems ' and 
 ' Silhouettes' by MR. ARTHUR SYMONS : ' We only refer to them 
 now to note a fact which they illustrate, and which we have been 
 observing of late, namely, the recovery to a certain extent of good 
 taste in the matter of printing and binding books. These two 
 books, which are turned out by MESSRS. ELKIN MATHEWS AND 
 JOHN LANE, are models of artistic publishing, and yet they are 
 simplicity itself. The books with their excellent printing and their 
 very simplicity make a harmony which is satisfying to the artistic 
 sense.' Sunday Sun, Oct. 2, 1892. 
 
 ' MR. LE GALLIENNE is a fortunate young gentleman. I don't 
 know by what legerdemain he and his publishers work, but here, 
 in an age as stony to poetry as the ages of Chatterton and Richard 
 Savage, we find the full edition of his book sold before publication. 
 How is it done, MESSRS. ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE? 
 for, without depreciating MR. LE GALLIENNE'S sweetness and 
 charm, I doubt that the marvel would have been wrought under 
 another publisher. These publishers, indeed, produce books so de- 
 lightfully that it must give an added pleasure to the hoarding of first 
 editions.' KATHARINE TYNAN in The Irish Daily Independent. 
 
 To MESSRS. ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE almost more 
 than to any other, we take it, are the thanks of the grateful singer 
 especially due ; for it is they who have managed, by means of 
 limited editions and charming workmanship, to impress book- 
 buyers with the belief that a volume may have an aesthetic and 
 commercial value. They have made it possible to speculate in the 
 latest discovered poet, as in a new company with the difference 
 that an operation in the former can be done with three half-crowns. ' 
 
 St. James s Gazette.
 
 January 1894. 
 
 List of Books 
 
 IN 
 
 BELLES LETTRES 
 
 (Including some Transfers) 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 Elkin Mathews and John Lane 
 
 ttfie BoUlep ^eafc 
 
 VIGO STREET, LONDON, W. 
 
 N. B. The A uthors and Publishers reserve the right of reprinting 
 any book in this list if a second edition is called for, except in cases 
 where a stipulation has been made to the contrary, and of printing 
 a separate edition of any of the books for America irrespective of the 
 numbers to which the English editions are limited. The numbers 
 mentioned do not include the copies sent for review or to the public 
 libraries. 
 
 ADAMS (FRANCIS). 
 
 ESSAYS IN MODERNITY. Cr. 8vo. $s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 ALLEN (GRANT). 
 
 THE LOWER SLOPES : A Volume of Verse. 600 copies. 
 Cr. 8vo. 55. net. [Immediately. 
 
 ANT.EUS. 
 
 THE BACKSLIDER AND OTHER POEMS. 100 only. 
 Small 4to. 7s.6d.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 BEECHING (H. C.), J. W. MACKAIL, & 
 
 J. B. B. NICHOLS. 
 
 LOVE IN IDLENESS. With Vignette by W. B. SCOTT. 
 Fcap. 8vo, half vellum. I2s.net. [Very few remain. 
 Transferred by the Authors to the present Publishers.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 BENSON (ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER). 
 POEMS. 550 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 55. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 BENSON (EUGENE). 
 
 FROM THE ASOLAN HILLS : A Poem. 300 copies. Imp. 
 l6mo. 55. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 BINYON (LAURENCE). 
 
 POEMS. i6mo. $s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 BOURDILLON (F. W.). 
 
 A LOST GOD : A Poem. With Illustrations by H. J. FORD. 
 500 copies. 8vo. 6s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 BOURDILLON (F. W.). 
 
 AILES D'ALOUETTE. Poems printed at the private press 
 of Rev. H. DANIEL, Oxford. 100 only. i6mo. 
 i, IDS. net. [Not published. 
 
 BRIDGES (ROBERT). 
 
 THE GROWTH OF LOVE. Printed in Fell's old English 
 type at the private press of Rev. H. DANIEL, Oxford. 
 100 only. Fcap. 4to. 2, 123. 6d. net. 
 
 [Not published. 
 
 COLERIDGE (HON. STEPHEN). 
 
 THE SANCTITY OF CONFESSION : A Romance. Second 
 Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s.net. [A feiv remain. 
 
 CRANE (WALTER). 
 
 RENASCENCE : A Book of Verse. Frontispiece and 38 
 designs by the Author. 
 
 [Small paper edition out of print. 
 
 There remain a few large paper copies, fcap. 410. i, is. net. 
 And a few fcap. 410, Japanese vellum. j, 155. net. 
 
 CROSSING (WM.). 
 
 THE ANCIENT CROSSES OF DARTMOOR. With 1 1 plates. 
 8vo, cloth. 45. 6d. net. [ Very few remain.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 PLAYS : An Unhistorical Pastoral ; A Romantic Farce ; 
 Bruce, a Chronicle Play ; Smith, a Tragic Farce ; 
 Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime, with a Frontis- 
 piece, Title-page, and Cover Design by AUBREY 
 BEARDSLEY. 500 copies. Small 410. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 [Immediately. 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 FLEET STREET ECLOGUES. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo, 
 buckram. 55. net. 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 A RANDOM ITINERARY : Prose Sketches, with a Ballad. 
 Frontispiece, Title-page, and Cover Design by LAUR- 
 ENCE HOUSMAN. Fcap. 8vo. Uniform with ' Fleet 
 Street Eclogues.' 55. net. 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 THE NORTH WALL. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 The few remaining copies transferred by the Author 
 to the present Publishers. 
 
 DE GRUCHY (AUGUSTA). 
 
 UNDER THE HAWTHORN, AND OTHER VERSES. Frontis- 
 piece by WALTER CRANE. 300 copies. Crown 8vo. 
 5s. net. f Very few remain. 
 
 Also 30 copies on Japanese vellum. 155. net. 
 
 DE TABLEY (LORD). 
 
 POEMS, DRAMATIC AND LYRICAL. By JOHN LEICESTER 
 WARREN (Lord De Tabley). Illustrations and Cover 
 Design by C. S. RICKETTS. Second Edition. 
 Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 DIAL (THE). 
 
 No. i of the Second Series. Illustrations by RICKETTS, 
 SHANNON, PISSARRO. 200 only. 410. 1, is. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 The present series will be continued at irregular intervals.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 EGERTON (GEORGE). 
 
 KEYNOTES : Short Stories. With Title-page by AUBREY 
 BEARDSLEY. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 FIELD (MICHAEL). 
 
 SIGHT AND SONG. (Poems on Pictures.) 400 copies. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 53. net. [ Veryfeiu remain. 
 
 FIELD (MICHAEL). 
 
 STEPHANIA : A Trialogue in Three Acts. 250 copies. 
 Pott 4to. 6s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 GALE (NORMAN). 
 
 ORCHARD SONGS. Fcap. 8vo. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by J. ILLINGWORTH KAY. 55. net. 
 
 Also a Special Edition limited in number on hand-made paper 
 bound in English vellum. i, is. net. 
 
 GARNETT (RICHARD). 
 
 A VOLUME OF POEMS. 350 copies. Crown 8vo. With 
 Title-page designed byj. ILLINGWORTH KAY. 55. net. 
 
 GOSSE (EDMUND). 
 
 THE LETTERS OF THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES. Now 
 first edited. Pott 8vo. 53. net. 
 
 [Immediate/)'. 
 GRAHAME (KENNETH). 
 
 PAGAN PAPERS : A Volume of Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 
 55. net. 
 
 GREENE (G. A.). 
 
 ITALIAN LYRISTS OF TO-DAY. Translations in the 
 original metres from about thirty-five living Italian 
 poets, with bibliographical and biographical notes. 
 Crown 8vo. 53. net. 

 
 ELKIN MATHEWS <V JOHN LANE 
 
 HAKE (DR. T. GORDON). 
 
 A SELECTION FROM HIS POEMS. Edited by Mrs. 
 MEYNELL. With a Portrait after D. G. ROSSETTI. 
 Crown 8vo. 53. net. [Immediately. 
 
 HALLAM (ARTHUR HENRY). 
 
 THE POEMS, together with his essay ( On Some of the 
 Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical 
 Poems of ALFRED TENNYSON.' Edited, with an 
 Introduction, by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 550 
 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 53. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 HAMILTON (COL. IAN). 
 
 THE BALLAD OF HADJI AND OTHER POEMS. Etched 
 Frontispiece by WM. STRANG. 50 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 
 33. net. 
 Transferred by the A uthor to the present Publishers. 
 
 HAYES (ALFRED). 
 
 THE VALE OF ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS. With Title- 
 page and Cover Design by LAURENCE HOUSMAN. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 55. net. [In preparation. 
 
 HICKEY (EMILY H.). 
 
 VERSE TALES, LYRICS AND TRANSLATIONS. 300 copies. 
 Imp. i6mo. 55. net. 
 
 HORNE (HERBERT P.). 
 
 DIVERSI COLORES : Poems. With ornaments by the 
 Author. 250 copies. :6mo. 5s.net. 
 
 IMAGE (SELWYN). 
 
 CAROLS AND POEMS. With decorations by H. P. HORNE. 
 250 copies. l6mo. 5s.net. [In preparation. 
 
 JAMES (W. P.). 
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS : A Volume of Essays, with Title- 
 pa ge by J. ILLING WORTH KAY. Crown 8vo. 5s.net. 
 
 [Immediately,
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 JOHNSON (EFFIE). 
 
 IN THE FIRE AND OTHER FANCIES. Frontispiece by 
 WALTER CRANE. 500 copies. Imp. i6mo. 35. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 JOHNSON (LIONEL). 
 
 THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY: Six Essays. With 
 Etched Portrait by WM. STRANG, and Bibliography 
 by JOHN LANE. Crown 8vo. 55. 6d. net. 
 
 Also 150 copies, large paper, with proofs of the portrait. 1, is. 
 net. [ Very shortly. 
 
 JOHNSON (LIONEL). 
 
 A VOLUME OF POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. 53. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 KEATS (JOHN). 
 
 THREE ESSAYS, now issued in book form for the first time. 
 Edited by H. BUXTON FORMAN. With Life-mask 
 by HAYDON. Fcap. 4to. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 LEATHER (R. K.). 
 
 VERSES. 250 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 35. net. 
 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers. 
 
 LEATHER (R. K.), & RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 THE STUDENT AND THE BODY-SNATCHER AND OTHER 
 TRIFLES. [Small paper edition out of print. 
 
 There remain a very few of the 50 large paper copies. 73. 6d. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 PROSE FANCIES. With a Portrait of the Author. Cr. 8vo. 
 
 55. net. 
 Also a limited large paper edition, i2s.6d.net. [In preparation. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 THE BOOK BILLS OF NARCISSUS. An Account rendered 
 by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. Second Edition. 
 Crown 8vo, buckram. 3s. 6d. net. 

 
 ELKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 ENGLISH POEMS. Third Edition, cr. 8vo. 55. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH : Some Characteristics. With a Biblio- 
 graphy (much enlarged) by JOHN LANE, portrait, etc. 
 Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 53. 6d. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 THE RELIGION OF A LITERARY MAN. Cr. Svo. yd 
 
 thousand. 33. 6d. net. 
 
 Also a special rubricated edition on hand-made paper. Svo. 
 IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 LETTERS TO LIVING ARTISTS. 
 
 500 copies. Fcap. Svo. 33. 6d. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARSTON (PHILIP BOURKE). 
 
 A LAST HARVEST: LYRICS AND SONNETS FROM THE 
 BOOK OF LOVE. Edited by LOUISE CHANDLER 
 MOULTON. 500 copies. Fcap. Svo. 55. net. 
 Also 50 copies on large paper, hand-made. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARTIN (W. WILSEY). 
 
 QUATRAINS, LIFE'S MYSTERY AND OTHER POEMS. i6mo. 
 2s. 6d. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARZIALS (THEO.). 
 
 THE GALLERY OF PIGEONS AND OTHER POEMS. Fcap. 
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 Trattsf erred by the Author to the present Publishers. 
 
 MEYNELL (MRS.), (ALICE C. THOMPSON). 
 
 POEMS. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo. 33. 6d. net. A 
 few of the 50 large paper copies (First Edition) remain, 
 I2s. 6d. net.
 
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 THE RHYTHM OF LIFE, AND OTHER ESSAYS. Second 
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 PORTRAIT AS BEATRICE CENCI. With critical notice 
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 NETTLESHIP (J. T.). 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING : Essays and Thoughts. Third 
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 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND AND OTHER ESSAYS. Title- 
 page and Cover Design by AUSTIN YOUNG. 600 
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 NOEL (HON. RODEN). 
 
 POOR PEOPLE'S CHRISTMAS. 250 copies. i6mo. is. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 OXFORD CHARACTERS. 
 
 A series of lithographed portraits by WILL ROTHENSTEIN, 
 with text by F. YORK POWELL and others. To be 
 issued monthly in term. Each number will contain 
 two portraits. Part I. contains portraits of SIR HENRY 
 ACLAND and Mr. W. A. L. FLETCHER, and Part II. 
 of Mr. ROBINSON K. ELLIS, and LORD ST. CYRES. 
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 PINKERTON (PERCY). 
 
 GALEAZZO : A Venetian Episode and other Poems. 
 Etched Frontispiece. i6mo. 55. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 Transferred by tilt Author to the present Publishers. 

 
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 RADFORD (DOLLIE). 
 
 SONGS. A New Volume of Verse. [In preparation. 
 
 RADFORD (ERNEST). 
 
 CHAMBERS TWAIN. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANF. 
 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo. 53. net. 
 
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 SCHAFF (DR. P.). 
 
 LITERATURE AND POETRY : Papers on Dante, etc. 
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 A POET'S HARVEST HOME : WITH AN AFTERMATH. 
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 *** Will not be reprinted. 
 
 SHAW (A. D. L.). 
 
 THE HAPPY WANDERER. Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 55. net. 
 
 [/ preparation. 
 STODDARD (R. H.). 
 
 THE LION'S CUB; WITH OTHER VERSE. Portrait. 
 100 copies only, bound in an illuminated Persian 
 design. Fcap. 8vo. 53. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 SYMONDS (JOHN ADDINGTON). 
 
 IN THE KEY OF BLUE, AND OTHER PROSE ESSAYS. 
 Cover designed by C. S. RICKETTS. Second Edition. 
 Thick Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 THOMPSON (FRANCIS). 
 
 A VOLUME OF POEMS. With Frontispiece, Title-page 
 and Cover Design by LAURENCE HOUSMAN. Second 
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 TODHUNTER (JOHN). 
 
 A SICILIAN IDYLL. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANE. 
 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo. 55. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper, fcap. 410. IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 \_Veryfew remain.
 
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 TOM SON (GRAHAM R.). 
 
 AFTER SUNSET. A Volume of Poems. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by R. ANNING BELL. Fcap. Svo. 55. 
 net. 
 
 Also a limited large paper edition. i2S.6d.net. [In preparation. 
 
 TREE (H. BEERBOHM). 
 
 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY : A Lecture delivered at the 
 Royal Institution. With portrait of Mr. TREE from 
 an unpublished drawing by the Marchioness of Granby. 
 Fcap. Svo, boards. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE). 
 
 CUCKOO SONGS. With Title-page and Cover Design by 
 LAURENCE HOUSMAN. 500 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 55. 
 net. [/ preparation. 
 
 VAN DYKE (HENRY). 
 
 THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. Third Edition, enlarged. 
 
 Crown Svo. 55. 6d. net. 
 
 The late Laureate himself gave valuable aid in correcting 
 various details. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 THE ELOPING ANGELS : A Caprice. Second Edition. 
 Square i6mo, buckram. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 EXCURSIONS IN CRITICISM : being some Prose Recrea- 
 tions of a Rhymer. Second Edition. Cr. Svo. 55. net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 THE PRINCE'S QUEST, AND OTHER POEMS. With a 
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 WEDMORE (FREDERICK). 
 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE RENUNCIATIONS. A volume of 
 Stories. Title-page by JOHN FDLLEYLOVE, R.I. 
 Crown Svo. 55. net. 
 
 A few of the large paper copies of Renunciations (First Edition) 
 remain, los. 6d. net.
 
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 WICKSTEED (P. H.). 
 
 DANTE. Six Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. net. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 THE SPHINX. A poem decorated throughout in line and 
 colour, and bound in a design by CHARLES RICKETTS. 
 250 copies. 2, 2s. net. 25 copies large paper. 
 ;5, 55. net. [Very shortly. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 The incomparable and ingenious history of Mr. W. H. , 
 being the true secret of Shakespear's sonnets now for 
 the first time here fully set forth, with initial letters 
 and cover design by CHARLES RICKETTS. 500 copies, 
 los. 6d. net. 
 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 2is.net. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 DRAMATIC WORKS, now printed for the first time with a 
 specially designed Title-page and binding to each 
 volume, by CHARLES SHANNON. 500 copies. Small 
 4to. 73. 6d. net per vol. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 155. net per vol. 
 
 Vol. i. LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN : A Comedy in 
 
 Four Acts. [Ready. 
 
 Vol. n. A WOMAN OF No IMPORTANCE : A Comedy 
 
 in Four Acts. [Shortly. 
 
 Vol. ill. THE DUCHESS OF PADUA : A Blank Verse 
 
 Tragedy in Five Acts. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 SALOME : A Tragedy in one Act, done into English. 
 With II Illustrations, title-page, and Cover Design 
 by AUBREY BEARDSLEY. 500 copies. Small 410. 
 
 155. net. 
 Also loo copies, large paper. 305. net. [Shortly. 
 
 WYNNE (FRANCES). 
 
 WHISPER. A Volume of Verse. With a Memoir by 
 Katharine Tynan and a Portrait added. Fcap. 8vo. 
 2s. 6d. net. 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.
 
 i 4 PUBLICATIONS OF ELKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 The Hobby Horse 
 
 A new series of this illustrated magazine will be published 
 quarterly by subscription, under the Editorship of Herbert 
 P. Home. Subscription i per annum, post free, for the 
 four numbers. Quarto, printed on hand -made paper, and 
 issued in a limited edition to subscribers only. The 
 Magazine will contain articles upon Literature, Music, 
 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts ; 
 Poems ; Essays ; Fiction ; original Designs ; with reproduc- 
 tions of pictures and drawings by the old masters and 
 contemporary artists. There will be a new title- 
 page and ornaments designed by the Editor. 
 Among the contributors to the 
 Hobby Horse are : 
 
 The late MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 LAURENCE BINYON. 
 
 WILFRID BLUNT. 
 
 FORD MADOX BROWN. 
 
 The late ARTHUR BURGESS. 
 
 E. BURNE-JONES, A.R.A. 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON. 
 
 RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D. 
 
 A. J. HIPKINS, F.S.A. 
 
 SELWYN IMAGE. 
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON. 
 
 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 SIR F. LEIGHTON, Bart., P.R.A. 
 
 T. HOPE MCLACHLAN. 
 
 MAY MORRIS. 
 
 C. HUBERT H. PARRY, Mus. Doc. 
 
 A. W. POLLARD. 
 
 F. YORK POWELL. 
 CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI. 
 W. M. ROSSETTI. 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 
 FREDERICK SANDYS. 
 
 The late W. BELL SCOTT. 
 
 FREDERICK J. SHIELDS. 
 
 J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 The late JAMES SMETHAM. 
 
 SIMEON SOLOMON. 
 
 A. SOMERVELL. 
 
 The late J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 
 
 KATHARINE TYNAN. 
 
 G. F. WATTS, R.A. 
 FREDERICK WEDMORE. 
 OSCAR WILDE. 
 
 Prospectuses on Application. 
 
 THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
 
 ' Nearly every book put out by Messrs. Elkin Mathews & 
 John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head, is a satisfaction to 
 the special senses of the modern bookman for bindings, shapes, 
 types, and papers. They have surpassed themselves, and 
 registered a real achievement in English bookmaking by the 
 volume of " Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical, " of Lord De Tabley. ' 
 
 Newcastle Daily Chronicle. 
 
 * A ray of hopefulness is stealing again into English poetry 
 after the twilight greys of Clough and Arnold and Tennyson. 
 Even unbelief wears braver colours. Despite the jeremiads, 
 which are the dirges of the elder gods, England is still a nest 
 of singing-birds (teste the Catalogue of Elkin Mathews and John 
 Lane).' Mr. ZANGWILL in Pall Mall Magazine. 
 
 'All Messrs. Mathews & Lane's Books are so beautifully 
 printed and so tastefully issued, that it rejoices the heart of a 
 book-lover to handle them ; but they have shown their sound 
 judgment not less markedly in the literary quality of their 
 publications. The choiceness of form is not inappropriate to 
 the matter, which is always of something more than ephemeral 
 worth. This was a distinction on which the better publishers 
 at one time prided themselves ; they never lent their names to 
 trash ; but some names associated with worthy traditions have 
 proved more than once a delusion and a snare. The record of 
 Messrs. Elkin Mathews & John Lane is perfect in this respect, 
 and their imprint is a guarantee of the worth of what they 
 publish.' Birmingham Daily Post, Nov. 6, 1893. 
 
 ' One can nearly always be certain when one sees on the title- 
 page of any given book the name of Messrs Elkin Mathews & 
 John Lane as being the publishers thereof that there will be 
 something worth reading to be found between the boards.' 
 World.
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLK 
 Printers to Her Majesty 

 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 Goleta, California 
 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
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