If there is justification for any given religion, and justification for the acceptance of supernatural authority as regards this religion, then there can be no justification for the acceptance of all religions, good and bad alike. There can, at the outside, be a justification for but one or two. Mr. Kidd’s grouping of all religions together is offensive to every earnest believer. Moreover, in his anxiety to insist only on the irrational side of religion, he naturally tends to exalt precisely those forms of superstition which are most repugnant to reasoning beings with moral instincts, and which are most heartily condemned by believers in the loftiest religions. He apparently condemns Lecky for what Lecky says of that species of unpleasant and noxious anchorite best typified by St. Simeon Stylites and the other pillar hermits. He corrects Lecky for his estimate of this ideal of the fourth century, and says that instead of being condemned it should be praised, as affording striking evidence and example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work. This is not true. The type of anchorite of which Mr. Lecky speaks with such just condemnation flourished most rankly in Christian Africa and Asia Minor, the very countries where Christianity was so speedily overthrown by Islam. It was not an example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work; on the contrary, it was a proof that those social forces were rotten and had lost their vigor. Where an anchorite of the type Lecky describes, and Mr. Kidd impliedly commends, was accepted as the true type of the church, and set the tone for religious thought, the church was corrupt, and was unable to make any effective defence against the scarcely baser form of superstition which received its development in Islamism. As a matter of fact, asceticism of this kind had very little in common with the really vigorous and growing part of European Christianity, even at that time. Such asceticism is far more closely related to the practices of some loathsome Mohammedan dervish than to any creed which has properly developed from the pure and lofty teachings of the Four Gospels. St. Simeon Stylites is more nearly kin to a Hindoo fakir than to Phillips Brooks or Archbishop Ireland. Mr. Kidd deserves praise for insisting as he does upon the great importance of the development of humanitarian feelings and of the ethical element in humanity during the past few centuries, when compared with the mere material development. He is, of course, entirely right in laying the utmost stress upon the enormous part taken by Christianity in the growth of Western civilization. He would do well to remember, however, that there are other elements than that of merely ceremonial Christianity at work, and that such ceremonial Christianity in other races produces quite different results, as he will see at a glance, if he will recall that Abyssinia and Hayti are Christian countries.