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, and in history.  The Interpreter’s Hand had to do with all these things.  Vanity Fair is not a place through which all pilgrims must pass as quickly as possible, shutting their eyes and stopping their ears so that they should neither see nor hear the wicked things that are done and said there.  Vanity Fair is the world in which we all have to live and do our work well, or neglect it.  Pope and Pagan are not the old giants who used to devour pilgrims, but who can now only gnash their teeth at them in impotent rage.  They are live forces, quite active, and with agents and supporters alert to capture souls.  Of all the influences which affected for evil my young life I perhaps resented most Mrs. Sherwood’s “Infant’s Progress.”  There were three children in it going from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City by the route