The notion is a very tempting one. What every prophet wants, in the babel of latter-day thought, is a magic sounding-board which shall make his voice carry to the ends of the earth and penetrate to the dullest understanding. The more he believes in his own reason, the more he yearns for some method of out-shouting the unreason of his neighbours. German philosophy thought it had discovered the ideal reverberator in the artillery of Herr Krupp von Bohlen; but the world is curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and has retorted in a still louder roar of high-explosive arguments. God, as a politico-philosophical ally, is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp; and, divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he is decidedly humaner. But is the glamour of his name quite what it once was? Or can it be restored to its pristine potency? On a question, such as this, on which the evidence is too vague, too voluminous and too complex to be interpreted with any certainty, our wishes are apt to take control of our thoughts. Making all allowance for this source of error, I nevertheless venture to suggest to Mr. Wells that we may perhaps be passing out of, not into, an age of religiosity. May it not be that the time has come to give the name of God a rest? Is it not possible, and even probable, that, while the vast apocalypse of the observatory and the laboratory is proceeding with unexampled speed, thinking people may prefer to await its developments, rather than pin their faith to an interim, synthetic God, whom his own still, small voice must, in moments of candor, confess to be merely make-believe? Is it the fact that men, or even women, of our race are, as a rule, absolutely dependent for courage, energy, self-control and self-devotion, upon some "great brother" outside themselves, "a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring and lovable," whom they conceive to be always within call? In making this assumption, is not Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism in the world around him--not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. _He is still a masterless man_" (p. 83). As Mr. Wells has evidently read a good deal about Japan, he no doubt takes this expression from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct class of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, by death or otherwise, lost his feudal superior. But is it really, to our Western sense, a misfortune to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human spirit suffer from having no one to bow down to, no one to relieve it of the