it was intended to express. This moral--the fruit of my education
at Oxford, and also of my experiences of society before I became
familiar with the wider world of London--was, as I have said already,
that without religion life is reduced to an absurdity, and that all
philosophy which aims at eliminating religion and basing human values on
some purely natural substitute is, if judged by the same standards, as
absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are
attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention
in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already,
_The New Republic_ by a short satirical romance, _Positivism on an
Island_, in the manner of Voltaire's _Candide_. My next work, _Is Life
Worth Living?_ in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of
formal logic, was largely due to that wider knowledge of the world with
which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest
criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the
kind of life there analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for
that very reason--that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and
that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were
deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some
such objection had been anticipated from the first by myself. I was
already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If
life without a God is unsatisfying, even to those for whom this world
has done its utmost, how much more unsatisfying must it be to that vast
majority for whom a large part of its pleasures are, from the nature of
things, impossible." But a closer and wider acquaintance with the kind
of life in question, and the sorrows and passions masked by it, prompted
me to translate the argument of the three books just mentioned into yet
another form--namely, that of a tragic novel--_A Romance of the
Nineteenth Century_.

This book was attacked by the apostles of non-religious morality with a
bitterness even greater than that which had been excited in them by _Is
Life Worth Living?_ And with these critics were associated many others,
who, whether they agreed or disagreed with its purely religious
tendencies, denounced it because it dealt plainly with certain
corruptions of human nature, the very mention of which, according to
them, was in itself corrupting, and was an outrage of the decorums o