Our Society met every Sunday evening for social intercourse and amusement; combined with the propagation of their advanced ideas. They were all free men and women, that is to say, they had got rid of old-world superstitions, and had dethroned God, setting up Science and the Nineteenth Century in His place. They were a perfectly proper and well-conducted set of people, who, though very revolutionary over tea and biscuits, defending Nihilism, dynamite mission work, and the loosening of mental fetters and actual bricks and mortar generally, would not have rashly upset even a box of crackers, or exploded a match in an unguarded manner. They were well dressed, spoke in subdued society tones, and conducted themselves exactly as other people, only they persisted in letting everybody know how extremely they disapproved of God. The young ladies were for the most part accompanied by their highly respectable mammas or papas, who did not seem in the least alarmed at their daughters’ sympathy with the violent doings of “men struggling for freedom;” or at the indifference to continued existence on this ill-conducted planet manifested by the young creatures in bewitching evening toilettes who were under their tutelage. The mammas and papas had heard it all before, and knew just what it meant; it made them rather proud, perhaps, when they saw a blushing young curate confronted for the first time with such advanced sentiments, but even the curate got over his alarm when he found how very harmless it all was, and how when the girls married they became just as reactionary as such people usually are when they realize that they have any responsibilities. For the most part the mammas seemed to act on the suggestion of one of the lights of their school of thought, who maintained that it was “the duty of parents to obey their children in all things;” reversing the Mosaic command, as being suitable for the governance of a nomadic tribe of Eastern people who had little or no science, but not a fit code of behaviour for the highly educated and well-convoluted brains of nineteenth-century children. Their mammas looked up to their offspring with a touching pride and awe—they had, from their superior height, been able to overlook and despise the lower ground on which their parents stood. The parents, indeed, still felt in their nerves—however much they might affect to disregard—the potent influence of the old creeds—they could not relegate to the limbo of discarded stage properties all the articles of the Christian faith in which they had been nurtured, but this their sons and daughters could and did; and they admired their superior attainments and often wished they had at their tongues’ ends those caustic and supercilious answers to the objections of the orthodox which came so readily from the lips of their children. It was they who would set the world right on all those points; it was they who would be able to forego prayer without that