If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises, though he might leave some of it unexpended--we should not, in spite of the L500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus up his sleeve? * * * * * In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could