The drift of this “chaos” in modern thought is, indeed, as noticeable amongst those who still cling to religious exercises and sing the hymns of childhood as amongst the larger populations who regretfully or defiantly, or more often in sheer apathy, have abandoned these ancient traditions and ceremonies. And just as, in Denison’s famous verdict, our large organised charities are less a sign of our compassion than of our indifference, so it may be that the noise of fierce fighting amongst rival religions, the queer competition which Mr. Charles Booth discovered even in the remotest slums of London for the bodies and souls of their denizens, may be less an evidence of religious fervour than a manifestation of an ebbing vitality. Yet the edifice collapses slowly, and in silence. No one can tell, at any definite moment, how far the disintegrating process has gone. Few records would be more illuminating than candid confessions, such as the confession recently made by Mr. Wells in his _First and Last Things_, honestly set down by quite ordinary people, in a casual street of a suburban terrace, of what they believed. If the industrious householders of “Homelea,” “Belle View,” “Buona Vista,” “Sunnyhurst,” and “The Laurels,” contiguous dwellings in Beaconsfield Road, Upper Norwood, were thus deliberately to face their convictions, the result might be surprising to the clergy of St. Aloysius and St. Clotilde, and the ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Baptist Chapel, beneath whose discourses, attired in long black coats, they sit in decorous silence Sunday after Sunday, seemingly as docile and acquiescent as their fathers before them.