Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very ingenious attempt, not exactly to found a new religion, but to place his ideas in a religious atmosphere. In the preface to _Androcles and the Lion_ (a disquisition just about as long as _God the Invisible King_) he propounds the question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" and opens the discussion thus: "The question seems a hopeless one after 2,000 years of resolute adherence to the old cry of 'Not this man, but Barabbas.' Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions. 'This man' has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way." Then he goes on to shew, by a course of very plausible reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic and social philosophy of G. B. S.; so that, in giving political expression to that philosophy, we should be, for the first time, establishing the Kingdom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there are passages in the Gospels which no more accord with Mr. Shaw's sociology than do omnipotence and omniscience with the theology of Mr. Wells. But these passages do not embarrass Mr. Shaw. He simply points out that, at Matthew xvi, 16, where Peter hailed him as "the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus went mad. Up to that fatal moment "his history is that of a man sane and interesting apart from his special gifts as orator, healer and prophet"; but from that point onward he set to work to live up to "his destiny as a god," part of which was to be killed and to rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad--for instance, Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we can have no difficulty in simply eliminating as a morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the sincere milk of the word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to place his philosophy under divine patronage is not so serious as Mr. Wells's; for Mr. Shaw can never take himself quite seriously for five pages together. But the motive, in each case, in manifestly the same--to obtain for a system of ideas the prestige, the power of insinuation, penetration, and stimulation, that attaches to the very name of religion.