ientific explanation of this phenomenon lay in the theory that
Christianity was indeed unique, and, at the very least, was the
most perfect human system of faith--perfectly human, I mean, in
that it embodied and answered adequately all the religious
aspirations of the human race--the most perfect system of faith
the world had ever seen.

"A third cause was to be found in the new philosophy of evidence
that began to prevail soon after the dawn of the century.

"Up to that period, so-called Physical Science had so far
tyrannized over men's minds as to persuade them to accept her
claim that evidence that could not be reduced to her terms was
not, properly speaking, evidence at all. Men demanded that purely
spiritual matters should be, as they said, 'proved,' by which
they meant should be reduced to physical terms. Little by little,
however, the preposterous nature of this claim was understood.
People began to perceive that each order of life had evidence
proper to itself--that there were such things, for instance, as
moral proofs, artistic proofs, and philosophical proofs; and that
these proofs were not interchangeable. To demand physical proof
for every article of belief was as fantastic as to demand, let us
say, a chemical proof of the beauty of a picture, or evidence in
terms of light or sound for the moral character of a friend, or
mathematical proof for the love of a mother for her child. This
very elementary idea seems to have come like a thunderclap upon
many who claimed the name of 'thinkers'; for it entirely
destroyed a whole artillery of arguments previously employed
against Revealed Religion.

"For a time, Pragmatism came to the rescue from the philosophical
camp; but the assault was but a very short one; since, tested by
Pragmatic methods (that is, the testing of the truth of a
religion by its appeal to human consciousness), if one fact stood
out luminous and undisputed, it was that the Catholic Religion,
with its eternal appeal in every century and to every type of
temperament, was utterly supreme.

"Let us turn to another point----"

(Mr. Manners lifted the glass he had been twirling between his
fingers, and drank it off with an appearance of great enjoyment.
Then he smacked his lips once or twice and continued.)

"Let us turn to the realm of politics--even to the realm of trade.

"Socialism, in its purely economic aspect, was a well-meant
attempt to abolish the law of competition--that is, the natu