ich are commonly called religious, and with which, during my
earlier years, my mind had been alone engaged.

This attempt at a synthesis was embodied ultimately in the form of
another novel, which I have mentioned already, and to which I gave the
name of _The Old Order Changes_. The scene of this story, like that of
_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_, was, for the most part, the
Riviera, and the story itself was to a very great extent the product of
many solitary hours at Beaulieu, during which Monte Carlo and the system
became no more than a dream. _The Old Order Changes_, moreover,
resembles its predecessor in this--that the love interest centers in a
woman considered in relation to her higher beliefs and principles; but
whereas in _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_ such higher beliefs and
principles are those connected with the mysticism of personal virtue,
they are connected in _The Old Order Changes_ with a sense of social
duty, as experienced by a well-born Catholic, to the mass of the common
people in respect of their material circumstances.

The heroine, who had come across the writings of modern agitators, in
which the masses are depicted as brutalized by an almost universal
poverty, most of the fruits of their industry being stolen from them by
the rapacious rich, becomes gradually possessed by the conviction that
this picture, even if exaggerated, is in the main true. Such being the
case, another conviction dawns on her, which troubles her nature to its
depth--namely, that the Catholic Church--her own religion by
inheritance--will for her have lost all meaning unless it absorbs into
the body of virtues enjoined by its doctrines on the rich a corporate
sense of their overwhelming obligations to the poor.

She lays bare the state of her mind to a highly connected and highly
intellectual priest, Father Stanley (who figures in _A Romance of the
Nineteenth Century_ also), and asks him if he thinks her wicked. The
priest's answer is No. "The Church," he says, "is always extending the
sphere of duty as from age to age needs and conditions change. Political
economy, as related to the conditions of labor, has indeed in our day
become a part of theology--its youngest branch; and as such, I, a
priest, have studied it. Every age has its riddle, and this riddle is
ours."

He then goes on to explain to her that the relation of the rich to the
masses is not so simple as she thinks it. The poverty which agitators
a