nted for all the difference
between the world he saw and that in which we move to-day. I suggest,
then, that so far as the minor moralities are concerned, no new
religion is required, and we have only to let things pursue their
natural trend.

And what of the great selflessnesses? What of the ideal loyalties?
What of the long-accumulated instincts which tell a man, in tones
which brook no contradiction, that the shortest life and the cruellest
death are better than the longest life of sensual self-contempt? Here,
as it seems to me, Mr. Wells's apostolate of a new religion is very
conspicuously superfluous--much more so than it would have been five
years ago. For have not he and I been privileged to witness one of the
most beautiful sights that the world ever saw--the flocking of Young
England, in its hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, to endure the
extremity of hardship and face the high probability of a cruel death,
not for England alone, not even for England, France and Belgium, but
for what they obscurely but very potently felt to be the highest
interests of the very same ideal entity which Mr. Wells proposes to
our devotion--the human race? I am sure he would be the last to
minimize the significance of that splendid uprising. No doubt there
were other motives at work: in some, the mere love of change and
adventure; in others, the pressure of public opinion. But my own
observation assures me that, on the whole, these unideal motives
played a very small part. The young men simply felt that he who held
back was unfaithful to his fathers and unworthy of his sons; and they
"turned away from self" without a moment's hesitation, and streamed to
the colors with all the more eagerness the longer the casualty-lists
grew, and the more clearly the horrors they had to face were brought
home to them. Has there been any voluntary "slaying of self" on so
huge a scale since the world began? I have not heard of it. And Mr.
Wells will scarcely tell me that these young men went through the
experiences he describes as "conversion," and escaped from the burden
of "over-individuation" by throwing themselves into the arms of a
synthetic God! Many of them, no doubt, would have expressed their
idealism, had they expressed it at all, in terms of Christianity; but
that, we are told, is a delusion, and the only true God is the
Invisible King. If that be so, the conclusion would seem to be that,
in the present stage of the evolution of human