Nothing was, in fact, further from the thought of the latter-day generation than to lie awake weeping for their sins. 'As a matter of fact,' writes Sir Oliver Lodge, 'the higher man of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their punishment; his mission, if he be good for anything, is to be up and doing.' That is an absolutely correct diagnosis. So little does the 'higher man of to-day' worry about his sins that he sinks into the slough of animalism undisturbed by any thought of wrong. Having sacrificed every canon of Christian morality, he goes forth out of his house where the peace is unbroken by the clamorous voices of children, and {157} he pursues his mission of being 'up and doing'--directing his energies in Whitechapel to keeping alive the children of the diseased and the miserable. This is the fine fruit of our 'higher man': having destroyed in his home that race whose product he is, unrepentant of his crime, he devotes himself to saving the race in the slum. His mission to be 'up and doing' savours of the slime--but he knows it not. His whole life is the proof that he has forgotten the meaning of iniquity, and that he is incapable of worrying about his sins. In all the books wherein the life of to-day is portrayed there move men and women whose consciences are no longer troubled by the thought of any wrong. With a photographic accuracy Arnold Bennett has set forth the lives of men and women emerging from the gutter into ease and riches, but the world to which they attain is a world where the thought of God ceases to inspire or disturb. He indeed pauses in a moment of grim {158} satire to visualise a soul in the throes of realising sin. The heroine of three books, Hilda Lessways, shuts her ears to the call summoning her to her mother's bedside, only to find her dead when selfishness suffers her to arrive. From the house where her dead mother lies she goes to the station to meet a relative and comes face to face with a well-dressed epileptic. She watches him, almost shuddering. He stares at her with his epileptic eyes ... and she rushes home a nervous wreck. 'She knew profoundly and fatally,' expounds Mr. Bennett, 'the evil principle which had conquered her so completely that she had no power left with which to fight it. This evil principle was sin itself. She was the sinner convicted and self-convicted. One of the last intelligent victims of a malady which has now almost passed away from the civilised earth, she existed in the chill and stricken desolation of incommutable doom.' Our author knows his world, and in that world only the sight of an epileptic {159} convinces of sin. And the realisation, as might be expected, only throws the victim more surely into the grip of sin. For that world knows no longer any God who saves from sin.