burden of choice, responsibility, self-control? If our feudal allegiance has terminated through the death of the Gods who asserted a hereditary claim upon it, must we make haste to build ourselves an idol, or synthetize a mosaic ikon, to serve as the recipient of our obeisances, genuflexions, osculations? I cannot believe that this is a general, and much less a universal, tendency. If any one is irked by the condition of a "masterless man," the Roman Catholic Church holds wide its doors for him. It seems very doubtful whether any less ancient, dogmatic, hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will serve his turn. It has sometimes seemed to me that the one great advantage of Western Christianity lies in the fact that nobody very seriously believes in it. "Nobody" is not a mathematically accurate expression, but it is quite in the line of the truth. You have to go to Asia to find out what religion means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve as a half-way house; but to study religion on its native heath, so to speak, you must go to India. Of course there may be some illusion in the matter, due to one's ignorance of the languages and inability to estimate the exact spiritual significance of outward manifestations; but I cannot believe that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any real effective dependence on any outward Power "dal tetto in su," which is so common in and around all Christian churches. In China and Japan it is another matter. There, I fancy, religious "ronins" are common enough. But in the lands of the Crescent and the land of "OM," anything like freedom of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the religions of their day were, as they are to us, nothing but more or less graceful fairy-tales.[4] We know that many of the greatest men the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation to the "deus absconditus" in various ways, were utterly free from that penitential, supplicatory abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvationism. And though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare, the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all. Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the "great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to