Even in the region of morals it is a backward step to restore God to the supremacy from which he has with the utmost difficulty been deposed. I am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe that any theological sanction is required for the plain essentials of social well-doing, or any theological stimulus for the rare sublimities of virtue. Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the clerical endeavour to set up a necessary association between right conduct and orthodoxy, between heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as well as I do; yet he can use such phrases as "Without God, the 'Service of Man' is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or a hypocrisy." No doubt he has carefully explained that he does not mean by God or religion what the clergy mean; but can he be sure that by imitating their phrases he may not imperceptibly slide into their frame of mind? or at any rate tempt the weaker brethren to do so? In using such an expression he comes perilously near the attitude adopted by the Bishop of London in a recent address to the sailors of the Grand Fleet. His Lordship told his hearers--we have it on his own authority--that "there was in everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have not known a case," he added, "where the good man conquered the bad man without religion." Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either telling--well, not the truth--or shamelessly playing with words? Of course it may be said that any man who keeps his lower instincts in control does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher values in life than sensual gratification or direct self-gratification of any sort; and we may, if we are so minded, call this feeling religion. But it is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the word, and we cannot take it to be the meaning the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in all probability--what he desired his simple-minded hearers to understand--was that he had never known a good man who did not believe, if not in all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man, redemption from sin, and the inspiration of the Scriptures. He meant that no man could be good who did not believe that God has given us in writing a synopsis of his plan of world-government, and has himself sojourned on earth and submitted to an appearance of death, some two thousand years ago, in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did _not_ mean that, he was, I repeat, playing with words and deceiving his hearers, who would certainly understand him to mean something to that effect; and if he _did_ mean that, he departed very palpably from the truth. The Bishop of London is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men of his own faith. He is a man of the modern world, and he must know, and know that he knows, scores of men as good as himself who have no belief in anything that he would recognize as religion. Perhaps he was not directly conscious of telling a falsehood, for "faith" plays such