?"

"_Which_ Christian religion? Catholic or Protestant? Anglican or
Nonconformist? . . . I won't ask you to give away your own side.
So we'll take the Protestant Nonconformists. There are a good many
down at the Club: you heard some of the things they said and printed
during the Election; and while your charity won't deny that they are
religious--some of 'em passionately religious--you will make haste to
concede that their religion and their bad temper were pretty well
inseparable. They would say pretty much the same of you
Anglo-Catholics."

"You will not pretend that we show bad temper in anything like the
same degree."

"Why should you? . . . I don't know that, as a fact, there is much to
choose between you; but at any rate the worse temper belongs very
properly to the under dog. Your Protestant is the under dog in
England to-day; socially, if not politically. . . . Yes, and
politically, too; for he may send what majority he will to the House
of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in
vain. The House of Lords--which is really not a political but a
social body, the citadel of a class--will confound his politics,
frustrate his knavish tricks. Can you wonder that he loses his
temper, sometimes inelegantly? And when the rich Nonconformist tires
of striving against all the odds--when he sets up his carriage and
his wife and daughters find that it won't carry them where they had
hoped--when he surrenders to their persuasions and goes over to the
enemy--why, then, can you wonder that his betrayed coreligionists
roar all like bears or foam like dogs and run about the city? . . .
I tell you, my dear Mr. Simeon, this England of ours stands in real
peril to-day of merging its class warfare in religious differences."

"You mean it, of course, the other way about--of merging our religion
in class warfare."

"I mean it as I said it. Class warfare is among Englishmen a quite
normal, healthy function of the body politic: it keeps the blood
circulating. It is when you start infecting it with religion the
trouble begins. . . . We are a sane people, however, on the whole;
and every sane person is better than his religion."

"How can you say such a thing?"

"How can you gainsay it--nay, or begin to doubt it--if only you will
be honest with yourself? Consider how many abominable things
religion has taught, and man, by the natural goodness of his heart,
has outgrown. Do you believe, for exa