as if by some pale effulgence of its own, or perhaps by a little store of light saved up from the liberal sunshine of the day.

Do you know what I think? said Vernet, with the look of a man who is about to confess a weakness of which he is ashamed. I sometimes think that if I were of the orthodox I should draw an argument for supernatural religion, against your strict materialists, from this sudden change of heart in Christian countries. For that is what it is. It is a change of heart; or, if you like to have it so, of spirit; and the remarkable thing is that it is nothing else. Whether it lasts or not, this awakening of brotherliness cannot be completely understood unless that is understood. What else has changed, these hundred years? There is no fresh discovery of human suffering, no new knowledge of the desperate poverty and toil of so many of our fellow-creatures: nor can we see better with our eyes, or understand better what we hear and see. This that we are talking about is a heart-growth, which, as we know, can make the lowliest peasant divine; not a mind-growth, which can be splendid in the coldest and most devilish man. Well, then, were I of the orthodox I should say this. When, after many generations, I see a traceless movement of the spirit of man like the one we are speaking of—a movement which, if it gains in strength and goes on to its natural end, will transfigure human society and make it infinitely more like heaven—I think the divine influence upon the development of man as a spirit may be direct and continuous; or, it would be better to say, not without repetition.

Vernet had to be reminded that the intellectual development of man had also shown itself in sudden starts and rushes toward perfection—now in one land, now in another; and never with an appearance of gradual progress, as might be expected from the nature of things. And therefore nothing in the spiritual advance which is declared by the sudden efflorescence of altruism dissociates it from the common theory of evolution. This he was forced to admit. I know, he replied; and as to intellectual development showing itself by starts and rushes, it is very obvious. But though he made the admission, I could see that he preferred belief in direct influence from above. And this was Vernet!—a most unexpected example of that Return to Religion which was not so manifest when we talked together as it is to-day.

You see, I am a soldier, he resumed, and a soldier born and bred does not know how to get on very long without feeling the presence of a General, a Commander. That I find as I grow old; my youth would have been ashamed to acknowledge the sentiment. And for its own sake, I hope that Science is becoming an old gentleman too, and willing to see its youthful confidence in the destruction of religious belief quite upset. For upset it certainly will be, and very much by its own hands. Most of the new professors were sure that the religious idea was to perish at last in the light of scientific inquiry. None of them seemed to suspect what I remember to have read in a fantastic magazine article two or three years ago, that unbelief in the existence of a providential God, the dissolution of that belief, would not retard but probably draw on more quickly the greater and yet unfulfilled triumphs of Christ on earth. Are you surprised at that? Certainly it is not the general idea of what unbelief is capable of. 'And what,' says some one in the story, 'what are those greater triumphs?' To which the answer is: 'The extension of charity, the diffusion of brotherly love, greed suppressed, luxury shameful, service and self-sacrifice a common law'—something like what we see already between mother and child, it was said. Now what do you think of that as a consequence of settled unbelief? As for Belief, we must allow that that has not done much to bring on the greater triumphs of Christianity.

And how is Unbelief to do this mighty work? said I.

"You would like to know! Why, in a most natural way, and not at all mysterious. But if you ask in how long a time——! Well, it is thus, as I understand. What the destruction of religious faith might have made of the world centuries ago we cannot tell; nothing much worse, perhaps, than it was under Belief, for belief can exist with little change of heart. But these are new times. Unbelief cannot annihilate the common feeling of humanity. On the contrary, we see that it is just when Science breaks religion down into agnosticism that a new day of tenderness for suffering begins, and poverty looks for the first time like a wrong. And why? To answer that question we should remember what centuries of belief taught us as to the place of man on earth in the plan of the Creator. This world, it was 'a scene of probation.' The mystery of pain and suffering, the burdens of life apportioned so unequally, the wicked prosperous, goodness wretched, innocent weakness trodden down or used up in starving toil—all this was explained by the scheme of probation. It was only for this life; and every hour of it we were under the eyes of a heavenly Father who knows all and weighs all; and there will be a future of redress that will leave no misery unreckoned, no weakness unconsidered, no wrong uncompensated that was patiently borne. Don't you remember? And how comfortable the doctrine was! How entirely it soothed our uneasiness when, sitting in warmth and plenty, we thought of the thousands of poor wretches outside! And it was a comfort for the poor wretches too, who believed most when they were most miserable or foully wronged that in His own good time God would requite or would avenge.

"Very well. But now, says my magazine sermoniser, suppose this idea of a heavenly Father a mistake and probation a fairy tale; suppose that there is no Divine scheme of redress beyond the grave: how do we mortals stand to each other then? How do we stand to each other in a world empty of all promise beyond it? What is to become of our scene-of-probation complacency, we who are happy and fortunate in the midst of so much wrong? And if we do not busy ourselves with a new dispensation on their behalf, what hope or consolation is there for the multitude of our fellow-creatures who are born to unmerited misery in the only world there is for any of us? It is clear that if we must give up the Divine scheme of redress as a dream, redress is an obligation returned upon ourselves. All will not be well in another world: all must be put right in this world or nowhere and never. Dispossessed of God and a future life, mankind is reduced to the condition of the wild creatures, each with a natural right to ravage for its own good. If in such conditions there is a duty of forbearance from ravaging, there is a duty of helpful surrender too; and unbelief must teach both duties, unless it would import upon earth the hell it denies. 'Unbelief is a call to bring in the justice, the compassion, the oneness of brotherhood that can never make a heaven for us elsewhere.' So the thing goes on; the end of the argument being that in this way unbelief itself may turn to the service of Heaven and do the work of the believer's God. More than that: in the doing of it the spiritual nature of man must be exalted, step by step. That may be its way of perfection. On that path it will rise higher and higher into Divine illuminations which have touched it but very feebly as yet, even after countless ages of existence.

Do you recognise these speculations? said Vernet, after a silence.

I recognised them well enough, without at all anticipating that so much of them would presently re-appear in the formal theory of more than one social