ept her debt to me, but that I was repaid after
her death in 1905, and she always felt that I had been a true friend to
her wayward son. I recollect one day my friend coming on his weekly
visit with a face of woe to tell me he had seen a man in dirt and rags,
with half a shirt, who had been well acquainted with Charles Dickens
and other notables in London. My friend had fed him and clothed him,
but he wanted to return to England to rich friends. I wrote to a few
good folk, and we raised the money and sent the wastrel to the old
country. How grateful he appeared to be, especially to the kind people
who had taken him in; but he never wrote a line. We never heard from
him again. Years afterwards I wrote to his brother-in-law, asking where
the object of our charity now was, if he were still alive. The reply
was that his ingratitude did not surprise the writer--that he was a
hopeless drunkard, a remittance man, whom the family had to ship off as
soon as possible when our ill-judged kindness sent him to England. At
that time he was in Canada, but it was not worth while to give any
address. When Mr. Bowyear started the Charity Organization Society in
Adelaide, he said I was no good as a visitor; I was too credulous, and
had not half enough of the detective in me. But I had not much faith in
this remittance man.

I have been strongly tempted to omit altogether the next book which I
wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its
work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's
Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties
the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly
overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first
part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough
of Despond by planting his foot on the stepping stones of the Promises.
He cannot, like Hopeful, pluck from his bosom the Key of Promise which
opens every lock in Doubting Castle when the two pilgrims are shut in
it by Giant Despair, when they are caught trespassing on his grounds.
Even assured Christians, we know, may occasionally trespass on these
grounds of doubt; but the weapons of modern warfare are not of the
seventeenth century. The Interpreter's House in the old allegory dealt
only with things found in the Bible, the only channel of revelation to
John Bunyan. To the modern pilgrim God reveals Himself in Nature, in
art, in literature, a