And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in English to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its vitality and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has gone below the shifting of forms and formulæ to the instinct that lies buried in the heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have already referred to those early chapters, the most perfect in the book I think, wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, visits his childhood's masters and questions them about the Divine Light which he would behold and follow amid the wandering lights of this world. Mr. Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his mother's knee, that such a Guide dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we need only to hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He thought that it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and philosophers of Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks--the godlike and the beautiful in one"--was still the lesson to be practised to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to understand how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and again in his letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once calls it. But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus. The precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr. Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I advocate belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men know and doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the sacraments that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest means of obtaining the silence of the world through which the Inner Voice speaks and is heard.