It is an entertaining thought. If it is true, I believe it is due to what I think of as the carburetor-adjustment of the human mind, a delicate, unconscious, and continuous process. It pleases me to imagine that in the intellect there is a valve that regulates the mixture of truth and convention that we utter, just as gasolene and heated air are mixed and vaporized in the carburetor of an engine. Whenever we meet any one, or at any rate any stranger, we are likely to be on our guard. We have our own little private reservoir of sincerity, but we don’t intend to draw on it too largely until we know we are safe. There are some people, as you must have noticed, to whom it is almost impossible to say a word of what you really believe. Accordingly, automatically and almost unconsciously, we make a mental adjustment of our “mixture.” We admit into it just as much truth as we believe the other is likely to relish, or willing to receive. But we may have made a bad guess. The conversation begins to back-fire. That means the mixture is too “lean.” Very well; pull out the choke, enrich it with more candour, all goes delightfully. Too “rich” a mixture, however, is, every mechanician knows, as bad as too “lean.” The mind gets crusted with carbon--unassimilated truth. The analogy seems to me highly applicable, even down to the infusion of what used to be called, in a bygone slang, “hot air.” Through this needle-valve, for the most part unconsciously, we regulate our mental ignition. All this, as you shall see presently, has its just bearing on our topic of religion. We need, but are little likely to get, a new “Areopagitica” to liberate our press from its cheery bondage of vulgarity and slip-slop thinking. The newspaper man who has pride in his honourable tradition may well feel grim to see the things he has sweat for trafficked across counters like bundles of merchandise; yes, and to see the transaction applauded by eminent statesmen and divines who feel the need of a front-page quote. A little pride is desirable now and then; yes, in God’s name, a little pride, gentlemen. We who have lived, as best we could, for the decency of letters; who have vigiled with Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes and changed opinion with Doctor Johnson, are we to be hired to and fro by the genial hucksters who know the art of print chiefly as a rapid factory for gaily tinted palaver?