ood. Since then there will ever be found those who in all
good faith and sincerity can adapt themselves to the popular need and
supply each level of intelligence with the medicine most suited to its
digestion, all we ask is that a variety of standards in controversial
writings be freely recognized; that each who feels called to such
efforts should put forth his very best with a view to helping those
minds which are likest his own; that none should deliberately condescend
to the use of what from his point of view would be sophistries and
vulgarities, remembering at the same time that the superiority of his
own taste and judgment is more relative than absolute, and that in the
eyes of those who come after, he himself may be but a Philistine.

We conclude then that all that can be done in the way of _Tracts for the
Million_ should be done; that seed of every kind should be scattered to
the four winds, hoping that each may find some congenial soil.

But even when all that can be done in this way to save the masses from
the contagion of unbelief has been done, we shall be as far as ever from
having found a substitute for the support which formerly was lent to
their faith by a Christianized public opinion. Can we hope for anything
more than thus to retard the leakage? The answer to this would take us
to the second of our proposed considerations, namely, our attitude
towards those who form and modify that public opinion by which the
masses are influenced for good or for evil. But it is an answer which
for the present must be deferred. [1]

_Nov._ 1900.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: The Introduction to the First Series of these essays
attempts to deal with this further question.]

XX.

AN APOSTLE OF NATURALISM.

"A man that could look no way but downwards, with a
muck-rake in his hand" and "did neither look up nor regard,
but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and the dust
of the floor.... Then said Christiana, 'Oh, deliver me
from this muck-rake.'"--Bunyan.

Naturalism includes various schools which agree in the first principle
that nothing is true but what can be justified by those axiomatic truths
which every-day experience forces upon our acceptance, not indeed as
self-evident, but as inevitable, unless we are to be incapacitated for
practical life. It is essentially the philosophy of the unphilosophical,
that is, of those who believe what they are accustomed to believe, and
bec