“Ah!  I take your point.  But, Dyce, I find as a painful matter of fact that Tom Bullock is by no means a religious man.  Tom, I have learnt, privately calls himself ‘a hagnostic,’ and is obliging enough to say among his intimates that, if the truth were told, I myself am the same.  Tom has got hold of evolutionary notions, which he illustrates in his daily work.  He knows all about natural selection, and the survival of the fittest.  Tom ought to be a very apt disciple of your bio-soeiological creed.  Unhappily a more selfish mortal doesn’t walk the earth.  He has been known to send his wife and children supperless to bed, because a festive meeting at a club to which he belongs demanded all the money in his pocket.  Tom, you see, feels himself one of the Select; his wife and children, holding an inferior place in great nature’s scheme, must be content to hunger now and then, and it’s their fault if they don’t feel a religious satisfaction in the privilege.”

“Why on earth do you employ such a man?” cried Dyce.

“Because, my dear boy, if I did not, no one else would, and Tom’s wife and children would have still greater opportunities of proving their disinterested citizenship.”

Dyce laughed.

“Speaking seriously again, father, Tom is what he is just because he hasn’t received the proper education.  Had he been rightly taught, who knows but he would, in fact, have been an apt disciple of the civic religion?”

“I fear me, Dyce, that no amount of civic instruction, or any other instruction, would have affected Tom’s ethics.  Tom is representative of his age.  Come, come; I have every wish to be just to you.  A new religion must have time; its leaven must work amid the lump.  You, my dear boy, are convinced that the leaven is, though a new sort, a very sound and sufficient yeast; let that be granted.  I, unfortunately, cannot believe anything of the kind.  To me your method of solution seems a deliberate insistence on the worldly in human nature, sure to have the practical result of making men more and more savagely materialist:  I see no hope whatever that you will inspire the world with enthusiasm for a noble civilisation by any theory based on biological teaching.  From my point of view, a man becomes noble in spite of the material laws which condition his life, never in consequence of them.  If you ask me how and why—­I bow my head and keep silence.”

“Can you maintain,” asked Dyce, respectfully, “that Christianity is still a civilising power?”

“To all appearances,” was the grave answer, “Christianity has failed—­utterly, absolutely, glaringly failed.  At this moment, the world, I am convinced, holds more potential barbarism than did the Roman Empire under the Antonines.  Wherever I look, I see a monstrous contrast between the professions and the practice, between the assumed and the actual aims, of so-called Christian peoples.  Christianity has failed to conquer the human heart.”