considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that undignified
gathering. He makes no attempt to be obscure or propitiatory in this
connection. He criticises the creeds explicitly and frankly, because he
believes it is particularly necessary to clear them out of the way of
those who are seeking religious consolation at this present time of
exceptional religious need. He does little to conceal his indignation at
the role played by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing
the religious life of mankind. After this warning such readers from
among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible
to storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an
ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read on
at their own risk. This is a religious book written by a believer,
but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to them more
sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism. That the writer
cannot tell. He is not simply denying their God. He is declaring that
there is a living God, different altogether from that Triune God and
nearer to the heart of man. The spirit of this book is like that of a
missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and smash some Polynesian
divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and mother-of-pearl. To the
writer such elaborations as "begotten of the Father before all worlds"
are no better than intellectual shark's teeth and oyster shells. His
purpose, like the purpose of that missionary, is not primarily to shock
and insult; but he is zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a
reverence that stands between man and God. He gives this fair warning
and proceeds with his matter.

His matter is modern religion as he sees it. It is only incidentally and
because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal Christianity.

In a previous book, "First and Last Things" (Constable and Co.), he has
stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and thought
as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of metaphysics that
is, seems to him to be a discussion of the relations of class and
individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist and the Realist, the
opposition of the One and the Many, the contrast of the Ideal and the
Actual, all these oppositions express a certain structural and essential
duality in the activity of the human mind. From an imperfect recognition
of that duality ensue great masses of misconception. That