in this statement I fully agree. The date in question is
almost exactly that at which I also became a qualified medical man, and
I, and I fancy most of my generation, believed ourselves to be agnostics
if not atheists. It was the atmosphere of the time, and so strong as
with difficulty to be resisted by those who resorted to the
Universities. The point which I want to make is that during the latter
part of the Victorian period we had come to a generation of
intellectuals practically devoid of religion and followed in that
respect by that always larger portion of any generation which, not
having brains to think for itself, yet desiring to follow the
intellectual _motif_ of the day, adopts whatever is the fashionable
attitude for the moment towards unseen things. Yesterday it was blank
negation; to-day it tends, as we shall see, to be spiritualism;
to-morrow it might be earnest faith: let us hope so. And as to
Calvinism, all this was _post hoc_ of course; _propter hoc_ also as I
think.

What followed? That is what we now have to consider. The first thing
which happened was the very natural discovery that science cannot
explain everything; has in fact a strictly limited range of country to
deal with. This discovery began to sap the foundations of materialism.
Then there came the further discovery that all was not well, as so many
supposed that it would be, under a scheme of life divorced from all
connection with religion. Mr. Lucas, who has given the world many
pleasant books, none of them with any obvious bias in favour of
religion, in _Over Bemertons_ (one of the most pleasant) makes one of
his characters, _Mr. Dabney_, deplore the loss of the seriousness of the
Victorian era: "We believe only in pleasure and success; our one ideal
is getting wealth." Parenthetically, is not that just what might be
expected? If there is really nothing but this world, what better can we
seek than as much pleasure as we can get out of it? _Over Bemertons_ was
first published in 1908, and the remedy which _Mr. Dabney_ then
suggested, with a really curious prophetical insight, has just been
vigorously applied. That remedy was "War, nothing more or less. A bloody
war--not a punitive expedition or 'a sort of a war'" (he quoted these
words with white fury) "'that might get us right again.' 'At great
cost,' I said. 'A surgical operation,' he replied, 'if the only means
of saving life, cannot be called expensive.'"

Finally the discovery was ma