As I have pointed out at some length, the greatest novels are one and all permeated with the sense of religion. Take your Thackeray and read in _Vanity Fair_ of George Osborne going out to battle and first saying “Our Father” with his wife. Read the works of this great writer and regard how, whenever a great emotion, a poignant situation occurs, so surely the author sends up a prayer to Almighty God either in his own person or that of his characters. In that almost greatest of English novels, Charles Reade’s _The Cloister and the Hearth_, the hero dies with the holy name of Jesus on his lips. There is religion in _Pickwick!_--we read of the Christmas of Dingley Dell. In _Les Misérables_, that huge epic novel, Victor Hugo has drawn more than one saint of God, has made Christianity the motive of his drama. It _is_ so in life, be certain that it is and always will be. Christianity is the central thing, the only important thing, and the attempt to minimize its importance and influence is as the chirping of a linnet on the roadside as some stately procession passes by. _They say. What say they? Let them say!_ But let no one be deluded into believing that the printed sneers of those who are afraid to recognize our Lord represent any real opinion, any weight of opinion, as to the public distaste to Christianity as an integral part of the fiction which they buy. Sir Arthur Helps once said, “The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are more often stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history or biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our experience; we adopt their feelings and imitate their acts. Shakespeare’s Plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles or Ulysses did in Homer.” All this is entirely true. As a young American novelist once put it to me, “To-day is the day of the novel.” In no other day and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed, and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idiosyncrasy. This is by no means intended as an apologia for the sort of tales I write. I know that it is my duty to write them, the duty I owe to my own convictions, and however badly I write them I am doing my best. No, I am not apologizing for my point of view. I am only trying to suggest that even in my greatest artistic failures my artistic standpoint can’t be assailed. Any critic who says that because I write as a Christian and that _therefore (and for that reason only)_ my books are inartistic, is wrong.