ng modern atheistic philosophy were based on a demonstration of
its results, and appealed not so much to pure religious emotion as to
the intellect, a sense of humor, and what is called a knowledge of the
world.

The writing of these works, the first of which I had begun while I was
still an undergraduate, occupied about six or seven years. Meanwhile,
side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a
growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or
Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in
this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the
years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English
followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new
political gospels seemed to me no less dangerous, and also no less
absurd, than those which I had previously attacked in the gospel of
atheistic philosophy, and my attention being forcibly diverted from
religious problems to social, I devoted myself to the writing of my
first political work, _Social Equality_ (published 1882), in which all
questions of religion were for the moment set aside. In my novel _The
Old Order Changes_, published four or five years later, the religious
problem and the social problem are united, and an attempt is made to
suggest the general terms on which the ideals of a true Conservatism may
be harmonized with those of an enlightened Socialism. As a result of my
political writings, I was asked, and with certain reservations I
consented, to become a candidate for a Scotch constituency.

Between the years 1890 and 1895 I turned again to social politics pure
and simple in two books, the first of which was _Labor and the Popular
Welfare_, the second being _Aristocracy and Evolution_.

My dealings with social politics being for the time exhausted, I devoted
about five years--1895 to 1900--to the composition of three novels, _A
Human Document_, _The Heart of Life_, and _The Individualist_, which
were studies of the relation of religion to the passions, feelings, and
foibles of which for most men the experiences of life consist.

Between the years 1900 and 1907 I published four works on the relation
of religious dogmas to philosophy and scientific knowledge--namely,
_Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_--this volume relating to the
Anglican controversies of the time--_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_,
_The Veil of the Temple_, and _The Reconstruction