such in the Court of Common Pleas. So far, then, nothing remotely
approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention
during the Retreat from Mons. Proof may come; if so, it will be
interesting and more than interesting.

But, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a
nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle
rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is
contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole
atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything--save
the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated
spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild,
not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him in
body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him
ignobly wild and mad indeed. It took hard, practical men of affairs,
business men, advanced thinkers, Freethinkers, to believe in Madame
Blavatsky and Mahatmas and the famous message from the Golden Shore:
"Judge's plan is right; follow him and _stick_."

And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs
undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the
Church of England. Christianity, as Mr. W.L. Courtney has so admirably
pointed out, is a great Mystery Religion; it is _the_ Mystery
Religion. Its priests are called to an awful and tremendous hierurgy;
its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the bridge-makers between the
world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact, they pass their
time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality,
in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer
and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it
seems to me.

The Bowmen

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of
the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But
it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin
and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away;
and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them
and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had
entered into their souls.

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms
with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little
English company, there was one point above all