One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the doctrines of religion credible. The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which, instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious terror. With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious, social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true faiths be revived on which the sanctities, the stabilities, and the civilization of the social order depend. I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best that he _might say_, if only he had chanced to think of it. On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however, may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter, in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events, go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that, through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself made a final--even a complacent--surrender to the forces which he had dreamed of dissipating.