ople are similarly
constituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty and devotion.
Time will show whether his psychology is correct. If it is, then he
has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely
illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a
donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of
traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds
to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens,
and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of
lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the carrot may quite
appreciably accelerate the general rate of progress. It all depends on
the psychology of the donkey.

Moses doubtless did very wisely in going up into Mount Sinai and
abiding there forty days and forty nights. Whatever he may have seen
and heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher Power
unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme of social reform which
it could never have attained had he offered it on its inherent merits,
as the project of a mere human legislator, or (still worse) of a man
of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his Children of Israel. Does Mr.
Wells know his modern Englishmen or Anglo-Americans?

That is the question.

Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very ingenious attempt, not
exactly to found a new religion, but to place his ideas in a religious
atmosphere. In the preface to _Androcles and the Lion_ (a disquisition
just about as long as _God the Invisible King_) he propounds the
question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" and opens the
discussion thus: "The question seems a hopeless one after 2,000 years
of resolute adherence to the old cry of 'Not this man, but Barabbas.'
Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of
his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of
money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions.
'This man' has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane
enough to try his way." Then he goes on to shew, by a course of very
plausible reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all
essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic and social
philosophy of G. B. S.; so that, in giving political expression to
that philosophy, we should be, for the first time, establishing the
Kingdom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there are passages in
the Gospels which no more accord with Mr. Shaw's sociology