Whether my view as to the cause, or one of the causes, is right or not, the fact remains that by the mid-Victorian period England had fallen to a very large extent a prey to materialism. Many people attribute the sudden onslaught of this to the publication of _The Origin of Species_ and the controversies of the foolish which followed thereon. Samuel Butler, that brilliant writer who has not even yet come into his own, sums up in his novel _The Way of All Flesh_ (and it may incidentally be remarked, in himself) most of the characteristics of the day. Many a parsonage home like that of the Rev. Theobald Pontifex existed in those days, and more than one Ernest Pontifex emerged from them. Now in this book Butler states that "the year 1858 was the last of a term during which the peace of the Church of England was singularly unbroken," and there no doubt he is right; "The Evangelical Movement ... had become almost a matter of ancient history. Tractarianism had subsided into a tenth-day's wonder; it was at work, but it was not noisy." Then he says the calm was broken by the publication of three books: _Essays and Reviews_, _The Origin of Species_, _Criticisms on the Pentateuch_ by Colenso. Few persons probably now remember the first and the last of these books; the fame of the second is likely to last long. Whether again Butler is right in his idea as to the causes or not, as to the fact there can be no doubt. We have arrived at a period when the prevalent opinion amongst the intellectual classes was that religion--belief in anything which could not be fully understood--was impossible once one began to think seriously about it. Those who did not really look into such questions might go on considering themselves to believe in revelation, but the moment that a man seriously tackled the subject, his religion was bound to go, just as that of Ernest Pontifex did at the end of five minutes' conversation with an atheistic shoemaker.[21] Agnosticism and materialism were in the air, and remained the dominant features for quite a number of years. There were those who deplored the loss of their faith such as it had been. Huxley obviously did; and Romanes, who afterwards returned to the Church of England, confessedly did. Such persons, and there were many of them, honestly were unable to believe, and said so. A great deal of this was due to the attitude of popular science at that time. It was in a hot fit, and was going to explain everything, if not to-day, at least to-morrow. Now, as Sir Oliver Lodge told us before the war, in his book _Continuity_, we are in a cold fit and we seem only to know that nothing can be known. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of _Sherlock Holmes_, tells us in a recent book from which I shall have further to quote (_The New Revelation_, Hodder and Stoughton, 1918): "When I had finished my medical education in 1882, I found myself, like many young medical men,