Produced by Mark C. Orton, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) “I BELIEVE” AND OTHER ESSAYS BY GUY THORNE Author of “When it Was Dark,” “First it was Ordained,” “Made in His Image,” etc., etc. LONDON F. V. WHITE & CO., Limited 14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C. 1907 RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. CONTENTS I. “I BELIEVE” II. THE FIRES OF MOLOCH III. THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD IV. THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL V. THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT VI. VAGROM MEN VII. AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG DEDICATION To F. V. WHITE, ESQUIRE. MY DEAR WHITE, The publication of this book is a business arrangement between you and me. Its dedication however has nothing to do with the relations of author and publisher in those capacities, but is merely an expression of friendship and esteem. This then is to remind you of pleasant hours we have spent together on the other side of the channel, in your house at London, and my house in Kent. Yours ever sincerely, GUY THORNE. “I BELIEVE” I “I BELIEVE” “_Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision_.” When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father’s study, and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid flavour of Bishop Butler’s advertisement, prefixed to the First Edition of his _Analogy_, at an early age, and I have thought lately that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly modified the mental attitude. Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was shortly to be “Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,” says about his literary contemporaries-- “It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Perhaps the difference between the times of George the Second and Edward the Seventh may be best discerned in the status and calibre of the popular penmen who in either age have found, or furnished amusement in a tilt against the Catholic Faith.