It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still remain obscure. Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress finds its grave in a universal suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed earth going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear recognition of its own worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world. It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels of a twentieth-century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to be dangerously “High,” because its curates wear coloured scarves; the Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul; the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires. There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable society which cannot easily be put by. The old lights have fallen from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa, to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it; not without foreboding to any who would desire, in the security of the suburbs, an unending end of the world.