for
the pleasure of youngsters. They were written by devotees. And this age
could not have produced them.

* * * * *

No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable,
and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of
idealists--men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything
except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning
nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all--they
sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations--to the pleasure of
slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the
world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught
alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: "That is
holy. Touch it not!" I mean the great philosophers and men of
science--especially the geologists--of the nineteenth century. I mean
such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They
inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it
impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had
questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the
realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a
land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: "We don't
know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and
then we shall feel safer." And there came a moment after which nobody
could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of
the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite
beauty of their naivete, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not
as artistic renderings of fact.

* * * * *

An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain
persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon
its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles
and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in
anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the
warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that
faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a
universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None
were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the
field of knowledge, as compared with the immeasurability of the field