at mere literature at its
best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be
worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the
other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that
literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be
practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion
on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the
ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted.
Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior
object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has
been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said
enough already, but I may once again define them.

One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the
loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to
metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the
doctrines of religion credible.

The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social
and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely
used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by
which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which,
instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious
terror.

With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas
underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to
discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty
years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more
widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of
fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by
which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious,
social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by
a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true
faiths be revived on which the sanctities, the stabilities, and the
civilization of the social order depend.

I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early
enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution
must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain
false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the
contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an
adv