It may be said that I am applying shockingly terrestrial tests to Mr. Wells's soaring transcendentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have called a luxury for the intellectually wealthy. It must be within the reach of plain men and women; and plain men and women cannot, as the French say, "pay themselves with words." Take them all round, they do not make too much of death. With or without the aid of religion, they generally meet it with tolerable fortitude. But it will be hard to persuade them that annihilation is a thing to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic God is indestructible; or that death is not death because other people will be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence. Even if you cannot offer them another life, you may tell them of the grave as a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, and they will understand. But will they understand if you tell them that we triumph over the grave because God dies with us and yet never dies? I fear it will need something clearer and more credible than this to make the undertaker a popular functionary. The doctrines of "the modern religion" may give us a new motive for living; but how can they at the same time diminish our distaste for dying? That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases where we felt that our death was promoting some great and sacred cause more than our life could have done; but such cases must always be extremely rare. Even the soldier on the battlefield will help his country more by living than by dying, if he can do so without failing in his duty. His death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than cowardice and disgrace. And what shall we say, for example, of the case of a young biologist who dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which the modern God might with advantage have swerved from his principles and (for once) played the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, to die in a good cause than to throw away life in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it not playing with words to say that even the end of a martyr to science like Captain Scott, or a martyr to humanity like Edith Cavell, is a triumph over death and the grave? It is a triumph over cowardice, baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our nature; but a triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which I do not believe) that German soldiers sign a declaration devoting the glycerine in their dead bodies to their country's service, one may imagine that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in resolving upon this final proof of patriotism; but it will be a gloomy satisfaction at best; there will be a lack of exhilaration about it; if the Herr Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures congratulates them on having triumphed over death, they will be apt to think it a rather empty form of words. If they had had the advantage of reading