real Christianity as put
forward by the Catholic Church, is it likely that they will cleave to a
faith which apparently engenders such absurdities as the Christmas
pudding episode? It is, indeed, as Father Wasmann says, a thousand
pities that the reasonableness, the logic, the dignity of the Catholic
religion should remain for ever hidden from the eyes and minds of many
who so often are as they are, because they were brought up as they were.
In all these things we find the key to another problem. In another essay
in this volume I have called attention to the glad intelligence, as it
seems to a certain school of writers, that we are freed from the
"bugbear of sin," as one of them puts it; able to enjoy ourselves
without any thoughts of that kind.

Now I cannot but believe that such writers are thinking of the bugbear
of artificial sins invented by the professors of a gloomy creed of
religion. It is not to be supposed that any serious writer--and those to
whom I allude are eminently such--would speak or write with pleasure and
satisfaction of escaping from the bugbear of sins against morality or
against one's neighbour; from the bugbear of dishonesty or theft; of
taking away a person's character; of running away with his wife. I am
convinced that it is the invented crimes of card-playing, theatre-going,
and the like to which they are alluding: it could not surely be
otherwise; and that makes it all the more unfortunate that before
misusing a technical term like the word "sin," and thus perhaps
misleading some young and ardent mind, such writers could not follow
Father Wasmann's advice and study some simple manual of Catholic ethics,
from which they would learn the real doctrine of Christianity and would
discover how very different a thing it is and how very much more
reasonable than the distorted caricature which we have been studying.

Sec. 2. THEOPHOBIA: ITS NEMESIS

Whether my view as to the cause, or one of the causes, is right or not,
the fact remains that by the mid-Victorian period England had fallen to
a very large extent a prey to materialism. Many people attribute the
sudden onslaught of this to the publication of _The Origin of Species_
and the controversies of the foolish which followed thereon. Samuel
Butler, that brilliant writer who has not even yet come into his own,
sums up in his novel _The Way of All Flesh_ (and it may incidentally be
remarked, in himself) most of the characteristics of the day. Man