I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition of _Robert Elsmere_, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In _Literature and Dogma_ he threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in _Robert Elsmere_, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after _Robert Elsmere_--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him! These great national structures that we call churches are too precious for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of _Essays and Reviews_, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for conscience' sake, all these years.