Butler's purpose is transparent. It is not, as Longmans, who refused the work, believed, to attack Christianity. It is rather to expose the ease with which a good man and his message (Higgs brought with him to Erewhon evangelical Christianity) can become miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and a cause of sham. Indeed, Butler says in so many words to the Anglicans of his day: "Hold fast to your Christianity, for false as it is it is better than what its enemies would substitute; but go easy with the miraculous, the mythical, the ritualistic. These 'tamper with the one sure and everlasting word of God revealed to us by human experience.'" All this is permanent enough, but I cannot believe, as most commentators do, that it is the heart of the book; or if it is the heart of the book, it is not its fire. The satiric rage of Butler, who in the person of Higgs returns to Erewhon to find himself deified, does not fall upon the fanatic worshipers of the sunchild, nor even upon the musical banks who have grown strong through his cult. It kindles for the ridiculous Hanky and Panky, professors respectively of worldly wisdom and worldly unwisdom at Bridgeford, and hence, according to Mr. Acklom, the antipathy toward Butler of all college professors. But it is not because they are professors that Butler hates Hanky and Panky; it is because they represent that guaranteed authority which in every civilization can and does exploit the passions and the weaknesses of human nature for its own material welfare. Butler had been conducting a lifelong warfare against scholars who defended the _status quo_ of the church and against scientists who were consolidating a strategic (and remunerative) position for themselves in the universities. He saw, or thought he saw, English religion milked for the benefit of Oxford and Cambridge graduates needful of "livings"; and Darwinism and the new sciences generally being swept into the maw of the same professionally intellectual class. A free lance himself, with a table in the British Museum, some books and a deficit instead of an income from his intellectual labors, he attacked the vested interests of his world.