ain (though it hardly ever does), the working classes of
this country have been very much cut off from Christianity. I do not
dream of denying, indeed I should take every opportunity of affirming,
that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on
rational apart from religious grounds. But a religion is the practical
protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to
be pugnacious. And our ideal, if it is to survive, will have to be
both.

Those who make merry over the landlady who has seen better days, of
whom something has been said already, commonly speak, in the same
jovial journalese, about her household goods as her household gods.
They would be much startled if they discovered how right they are.
Exactly what is lacking to the modern materialist is something that
can be what the household gods were to the ancient heathen. The
household gods of the heathen were not only wood and stone; at least
there is always more than that in the stone of the hearth-stone and
the wood of the roof-tree. So long as Christianity continued the
tradition of patron saints and portable relics, this idea of a
blessing on the household could continue. If men had not domestic
divinities, at least they had divine domesticities. When Christianity
was chilled with Puritanism and rationalism, this inner warmth or
secret fire in the house faded on the hearth. But some of the embers
still glow or at least glimmer; and there is still a memory among the
poor that their material possessions are something sacred. I know poor
men for whom it is the romance of their lives to refuse big sums of
money for an old copper warming-pan. They do not want it, in any sense
of base utility. They do not use it as a warming-pan; but it warms
them for all that. It is indeed, as Sergeant Buzfuz humorously
observed, a cover for hidden fire. And the fire is that which burned
before the strange and uncouth wooden gods, like giant dolls, in the
huts of ancient Italy. It is a household god. And I can imagine some
such neglected and unlucky English man dying with his eyes on the red
gleam of that piece of copper, as happier men have died with their
eyes on the golden gleam of a chalice or a cross.

It will thus be noted that there has always been some connection
between a mystical belief and the materials of domesticity; that they
generally go together; and that now, in a more mournful sense, they
are gone together. The working classe