itude.

Perhaps it is his knowledge of all this petty misery and sordid
unwholesomeness which makes him disposed at times, in spite of an almost
rollicking temperament, to take dismal and despairing views of the
religious future.

I have heard him say with some bitterness that people do not know what
Christianity is, that it has been so misrepresented to them, and so
mixed up with the quarrels of sectarianism, that the heart of it is
really non-existent for the multitude. He speaks with impatience of the
nonconformist churches and with contempt of the Anglican church. We are
all wrong together. Organised religion, he feels, is hanging over the
abyss of destruction, while the nation looks on with an indifference
which should complete its self-contempt.

His quarrel, however, is not only with the churches, but with the nation
as well. He regards the system under which we live as thoroughly
unchristian. It is the system of mammon--a system of frank, brutal, and
insolent materialism. Why do we put up with it?

His religious sense is so outraged by this system of economic
individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those
who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole
body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness,
the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which
informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot
be patched. It is anti-Christian. It should be smashed.

He plunges into economics with a good deal of vigour, but I do not think
he has thought out to its logical conclusion his thesis of guild
socialism. Perhaps his tone is here more vehement than his knowledge of
a notoriously difficult science altogether justifies.

He opposes himself to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth
century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His
contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only
the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may
picture him with drawn sword--a sword tempered in inquisitorial
fires--standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend it with his
spiritual life.

His opinions are apt to place him among minorities. He was against the
War, and during that long-drawn agony attracted to himself the mild
attention of the authorities. I believe he likened the great struggle to
a battle between Sodom and Gomorrah. However, he was ca