ing wool for a peeress, the only
surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of
some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual
motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has
been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many
respects a mere comedy of manners and characters--among the characters
was a South African millionaire and his wife--was under the surface
permeated by a serious meaning, being in effect an exhibition of the
"fantastic tricks" which those who reject the supernatural are driven to
play in their attempts to provide the world with a substitute.

But every general event must have a general cause, for which individuals
are not alone responsible; and the fantastic tricks of the people who
try to make religions for themselves cannot be due merely to the
idiosyncrasies of exceptionally foolish persons. There must be causes at
the back of them of a deeper and a wider kind. The first of these causes
is obviously the fact that, for some reason or other, multitudes who
know nothing of one another are independently coming to the conclusion
that supernaturalism, which was once accepted without question as the
main content or substratum of human life, rests on postulates which to
them are no longer credible. Why is this the case to-day, when it was
not the case yesterday? Of these necessary postulates two are the same
for all men--namely, an individual life which survives, the individual
body, and the moral responsibility of the individual, or his possession
of a free will. A third postulate, which is the same for all orthodox
Christians, is the miraculous inspiration of the Bible, whatever the
precise nature of this inspiration may be. Of these three postulates the
last has been discredited all over the world by biblical criticism and
scientific comparisons of one religion with another. The first and the
second have been discredited by advances in the science of biological
physics which has, with increasing precision, exhibited human life and
thought as mere functions of the physical organism, the organism itself
being, in turn, a part of the cosmic process. If this be the case, what
religious significance can attach to the individual as such? His
thoughts, his emotions, his actions, are no more his own than the action
of a windmill's sails or the antics of scraps of paper gyrating at a
windy corner.[3] The first license to men to