herents of this kind of religion will be chiefly found in circles
where people do not regard religion seriously, where they desire and
accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment." Nevertheless, the evil
attending this type of teaching is, to our thinking, great and serious,
designed to undermine selfhood and to set up a species of dry-rot at
the very centre.

Let us again show what we mean by quoting from an actual utterance:
"God," we read, "is supposed to be thinking more about us than about
anything else--a rather arrogant assumption when we come to think of
it, considering what specks of dust we are amid these myriads of stars
and suns whirling through space like motes in a ray of light--and the
great object of His solicitude is to get us individually to toe the
mark of Christ-likeness." If this view be the true one, the writer
went on to ask, why do questions like unemployment, the Budget, {70}
the uprising of nationalism in Turkey, etc., bulk so largely in our
thought? These topics, he says, have "little or no relation to the
question of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood." How,
he demands, does the actual life of every day fit into "that view of
the scheme of things which bids us believe that the silent God above us
is principally anxious about just one thing, the moral recovery and
ingathering of these individual souls one by one"? The answer is given
with characteristic confidence: "It does not fit into it at all; _if
God be as anxious about that as we are assured He is, He has a queer
way of showing it_."

Here we have a conception of man and his place in the sum of things
fundamentally at one with that of Mr. Wells, and as utterly
irreconcilable with that of Christianity. Not only does the individual
not matter in himself; he does not even matter to God. The idea of the
soul's infinite value to God is held up to derision, and so is the idea
of God's interest in individual character; man, the atom, must not
think that the Creator is specially anxious for his fate, and is bidden
to measure his insignificance against the vastness of the heavenly
bodies; and in conclusion we are pertly told that if God really cares
about the individual as such, "He has a queer way of showing it." In
this view--the view of Monism--it is indeed true that "the individual
withers, and the world is more and more."

{71}

We say that the issue is plain; it lies between Monism and
Christianity; if the one is tru