He exposed the dangers which wait upon all miraculous religions, the shams which they give birth to. But not because he was obsessed with theology. If he had lived in the nineteen hundreds he would have studied, I think, sociology and economics instead of theology and biology. He would have attacked, in England, the House of Lords instead of Oxford, and had an eye for the intellectuals who are beginning to sway the mighty power of the labor unions. He would have been a Radical-Conservative and voted against both the British Labor party and the Coalition. In America he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the Anti-Saloon League, admired and been exasperated by Mr. Wilson, hated the Republican party, and probably have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. He would have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much needed just now in America, a bad party man, destructive rather than constructive, no leader, but a satirist when, God knows, we need one for the clearing of our mental atmosphere. And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analysis, Samuel Butler, who mentally and spiritually is essentially our contemporary, would not, if he were writing now, concern himself with theology at all, but with the shams and unreasons which are the vested tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. Its concern is with an army and with economics. Chow-Bok, the savage, now become a missionary bishop, is about to administer its ecclesiastical system. Its spiritual problems no longer center upon the validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a theological code. But the vested interests (represented by Pocus, the son of Hanky) remain. These Butler would attack in the needed fashion. These remain the enemy. VII CONCLUSION DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE I am well aware that literature or even such an inconsiderable part of literature as this gay book on my desk or the poem on the printed page, as a whole is indefinable. Every critic of literature from Aristotle down has let some of it slip between his fingers. If he describes the cunning form of a play or a story, then the passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. If he defines the personality of the writer, the art which makes all the difference between feeling and expression escapes definition. No ten philosophers yet agree as to whether beauty is an absolute quality, or simply an attribute of form, whether a poem is beautiful because it suggests and approaches an archetype, or whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses its subject.