You cannot control conduct by asserting that a man owes a debt to an abstraction which you vivify by printing it with a capital letter, and there remains always the question of the dying Lucretius-- “Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well.” The problem, then, which we have to solve is--how to arrest the attention of the average man to those Christian principles, of which the acceptance or definite refusal will determine the course of civilization during the next twenty years. The mere assertion of authority will not suffice, and men are not impressed in favour of Catholic doctrine simply by dignified ceremony and Ritual. We have only to look across the English Channel to be assured of this. Frenchmen have not been encouraged to study the evidences of Christianity. Bishops and priests have only advertised sceptical books by forbidding their perusal to the faithful; and as the devout have been instructed to live by faith, but not how to give a reason for the faith which is in them, in the result M. Viviani’s atheistic rhetoric has been placarded at the cost of the State in every commune throughout France. We may consider, then, if there be any method by which the man who does not read theological or scientific or philosophical books, the man who has left off going to church, or gets no help from the average sermon, the man who has no reverence for mere authority, may be induced to consider the Christian Revelation as offering him a key to those riddles of life which his civic responsibilities are perpetually propounding. Remember that his present condition may be roughly described as consisting of religious haziness and moral laziness. The moral laziness is being subjected to a series of rough shocks. He _must_ make up his mind about some questions of morality. The relation of the sexes, the duties of property, the treatment of the subject savage, the survival of the unfit, the ethics of commerce, the control of the sale of alcohol, the education of children, these things he has to decide and he will ultimately decide. But he is at present perplexed, and his religious haziness is the reason of his perplexity. He perhaps has not reached the conclusion of his contemporary in France, but he is on the way to it. Those heavenly lights which M. Viviani declares that his Government has extinguished still shine faintly for men in England, though the mists obscure them. Can we get men to look upwards for light, and instead of cursing the ancient creed in a confused commination, to take Arthur Clough’s advice-- “Ah! yet consider it again.” I believe that there is a method, and as I mention it I am prepared for derision from all the “chorus of irresponsible reviewers, the irresponsible indolent reviewers.” I believe that Fiction will find those that can be reached by no other means. Fiction sometimes sets a man seeking for Fact.