composure in an amazing welter of hypocrisy and deceit.  There is, of course, the better side, the many thousands of Catholics and Protestants who sincerely aim at better things.  But what has to be admitted is that most sincerely religious people adopt to the man of no established religion the same attitude as does the hypocrite:  they join in the general cry.  They should look to their own houses; they should purge the temple of the money-lender and the knave; they should see that their field gives good harvest; they should remember that not to the atheist only but to the orthodox was it written:  “Every tree therefore that doth not yield good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire.”

V

There is a word to be said to the man for whom was invented the curious name agnostic.  I’m concerned only with him who is sincere and high-minded.  Let us pass the flippant critics of things they do not understand.  But all sincere men are comrades in a deep and fine sense.  What the honest unbeliever has to keep in mind is that the darker side is but one side.  If he stands studying a crowd of the orthodox and finds therein the drunkard, the gambler, the sensualist; and if he says bitter things of the value of religion and gets in return the clerical fiat of one who is more a politician than a priest; and if he rejoins contemptuously, “This is fit for women and children,” let him be reminded that he can also study the other side if he care.  If he has the instinct of a fighter he must know every army has in its trail the camp-follower and the vulture, but when the battle is set and the danger is imminent, only the true soldier stands his ground.  Because some who are of poor spirit are in high place, let him not forget the old spirit still exists.  Not only the women but the best intellects of men still keep the old traditions.  Newman and Pascal, Dante and Milton, Erigena and Aquinas, are all dead, but in our time even they have had followers not too far off.  In the same spirit Gilbert Chesterton found wonder at a wooden post, and Francis Thompson, in his divine wandering, troubled the gold gateways of the stars.  Let our friend before he frames his final judgment pause here.  He may well be baffled by many anomalies of the time, his eye may rest on the meaner horde, his ear be filled with the arrogance of some unworthy successor of Paul; and if he says:  “Why permit these things?” he may be told there are some alive in this generation who will question all such things, and who, however hard it go with them, have no fear for the final victory.

VI