Three hundred years ago, Robert Burton, who was reflective rather than mandatory, commented upon the reluctance of heretics to be converted from their errors. It seemed to him--a learned and detached onlooker--that one man’s word, however well spoken, had no effect upon another man’s views; and he marvelled unconcernedly that this should be the case. The tolerance or the indifference of our day has disinclined most of us to meddle with our neighbour’s beliefs. We are concerned about his tastes, his work, his politics, because at these points his life touches ours; but we have a decent regard for his spiritual freedom, and for the secret responsibility it entails. There are, indeed, devout Christian communities which expend their time, money and energy in extinguishing in the breasts of other Christians the faith which has sufficed and supported them. The methods of these propagandists are more genial than were those of the Inquisition; but their temerity is no less, and their animating principle is the same. They proffer their competing set of dogmas with absolute assurance, forgetting that man does not live by fractions of theology, but by the correspondence of his nature to spiritual influences moulded through the centuries to meet his needs. To counsel the doubtful is a Christian duty; but to create the doubts we counsel is nowhere recommended. It savours too closely of omniscience. The counsels offered by age to youth are less expansive, and less untrammelled than are the counsels offered by youth to age. Experience dulls the courageous and imaginative didacticism that is so heartening, because so sanguine, in the young. We have been told, both in England and in the United States, that youth is now somewhat displeased with age, as having made a mess of the world it was trying to run; and that the shrill defiance which meets criticism indicates this justifiable resentment. It is not an easy matter to run a world at the best of times, and Germany’s unfortunate ambition to control the running has put the job beyond man’s power of immediate adjustment. The social lapses that have been so loudly lamented by British and American censors are the least serious symptoms of the general disintegration--the crumbling away of a cornice when the foundations are insecure.