osmic Being, to
whose will it is the duty of the individual will to attune itself, and
it further requires the postulate that this Being is good in respect of
its relations to all individuals equally--that it represents, in short,
a multitude of individual benevolences. Nor does the matter end here.
Any definite religion postulates some recognized means by which the will
of this Being may be made known. I had hardly completed _Religion as a
Credible Doctrine_ before questions such as these, which there had been
hardly touched, began to impress themselves with new emphasis on my
mind. My desire was to take these questions in combination, and it
seemed to me that this could best be done by adopting a method less
formal than that which I had just pursued. I returned accordingly to the
methods of _The New Republic_.

In this new work, called _The Veil of the Temple_, the action begins at
a party in a great London house, where Rupert Glanville, a politician
who has just returned from the East, invites some friends to cut their
London dissipations short and pay him a visit at a curious marine
residence which a Protestant bishop, his ancestor, had constructed in
classical taste on the remotest coast of Ireland. A party is got
together, including a bishop of to-day and two ornaments of the Jockey
Club, together with some fashionable ladies and a Hegelian philosopher
educated at Glasgow and Oxford.

The intellectual argument of the book takes up the threads where
_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ dropped them. It begins at the dinner
table, where a well-known case of cheating at cards is discussed, and
the issue is raised of whether, or how far, a rich man who cheats at
cards is the master of his own actions or the pathological victim of
kleptomania. One of the lights of the Jockey Club is indignant at the
idea that the matter can be open to doubt. "If a gentleman," he says,
"is not free to abstain from cheating, what would become of the turf?
Eh, bishop--what would become of the Church? What would become of
anything?" Thus the question of free will is once again in the air, and
the more serious of the guests, as soon as the others depart, set
themselves to discuss both this and other questions kindred to it.

Of such other questions the most obvious is this: "How far do educated
persons, who are nominally 'professing Christians,' really believe in
doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, and more particularly in the authority
and s