ns. He is a pulpit rhetorician, so he goes boldly and recklessly
to work. Subtlety and discrimination he abhors as pedantic vices,
savoring too much of "culture." His judgments are of the robustious
order. Like Jesus Christ, he fancies that all men can be divided into
sheep and goats. The good are good, and the bad are bad. And naturally
the good are Christians and bad are Freethinkers.

The first half of Mr. Watkinson's book of 162 pages (it must have been
a pretty long lecture!) is a preface to the second half, which contains
his fling at Goethe, Mill, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Carlyle,
and other offenders against the Watkinsonian code. We think it
advisable, therefore, to follow him through his preface first, and
through his "charges" afterwards.

Embedded in a lot of obscure or questionable matter in Mr. Watkinson's
exordium is this sentence--"What we believe with our whole heart is of
the highest consequence to us." True, but whether it is of the highest
consequence to other people depends on what it is. Conviction is a good
thing, but it cannot dispense with the criterion of truth. On the other
hand, what passes for conviction may often be mere acquiescence. That
term, we believe, would accurately describe the creed of ninety-nine out
of every hundred, in every part of the world, whose particular faith is
merely the result of the geographical accident of their birth. Assuredly
we do not agree with Mr. Watkinson that "all reasonable people will
acknowledge that the faith of Christian believers is to a considerable
extent most real; nay, in tens of thousand of cases it is the most
real thing in their life." Mr. Cotter Morison laboriously refutes this
position in his fine volume on _The Service of Man_. Mill denied and
derided it in a famous passage of his great essay _On Liberty_. Mr.
Justice Stephen denies it in the _Nineteenth Century_. Carlyle also,
according to Mr. Fronde, said that "religion as it existed in England
had ceased to operate all over the conduct of men in their ordinary
business, it was a hollow appearance, a word without force in it." These
men may not be "reasonable" in Mr. Watkinson's judgment, but with most
people their word carries a greater weight than his.

Mr. Watkinson contends--and what will not a preacher contend?--that "the
denial of the great truths of the Evangelical faith can exert only
a baneful influence on character." We quite agree with him. But
evangelicalism, and the g