rect diagnosis. So little does the 'higher man of
to-day' worry about his sins that he sinks into the slough of animalism
undisturbed by any thought of wrong. Having sacrificed every canon of
Christian morality, he goes forth out of his house where the peace is
unbroken by the clamorous voices of children, and {157} he pursues his
mission of being 'up and doing'--directing his energies in Whitechapel
to keeping alive the children of the diseased and the miserable. This
is the fine fruit of our 'higher man': having destroyed in his home
that race whose product he is, unrepentant of his crime, he devotes
himself to saving the race in the slum. His mission to be 'up and
doing' savours of the slime--but he knows it not. His whole life is
the proof that he has forgotten the meaning of iniquity, and that he is
incapable of worrying about his sins.

In all the books wherein the life of to-day is portrayed there move men
and women whose consciences are no longer troubled by the thought of
any wrong. With a photographic accuracy Arnold Bennett has set forth
the lives of men and women emerging from the gutter into ease and
riches, but the world to which they attain is a world where the thought
of God ceases to inspire or disturb. He indeed pauses in a moment of
grim {158} satire to visualise a soul in the throes of realising sin.
The heroine of three books, Hilda Lessways, shuts her ears to the call
summoning her to her mother's bedside, only to find her dead when
selfishness suffers her to arrive. From the house where her dead
mother lies she goes to the station to meet a relative and comes face
to face with a well-dressed epileptic. She watches him, almost
shuddering. He stares at her with his epileptic eyes ... and she
rushes home a nervous wreck. 'She knew profoundly and fatally,'
expounds Mr. Bennett, 'the evil principle which had conquered her so
completely that she had no power left with which to fight it. This
evil principle was sin itself. She was the sinner convicted and
self-convicted. One of the last intelligent victims of a malady which
has now almost passed away from the civilised earth, she existed in the
chill and stricken desolation of incommutable doom.' Our author knows
his world, and in that world only the sight of an epileptic {159}
convinces of sin. And the realisation, as might be expected, only
throws the victim more surely into the grip of sin. For that world
knows no longer any God who s