The New Religion.—1. White and Black. 2. African Tales.—3. The End of the World.—4. Prophecy.—5. The Heretic. EVIDENTLY it is not the business of Idealism to furnish mankind with a new religion. The new religion is already with us. It has been with us for some hundreds of years. It is no longer struggling for a footing. It is partly established by law. It has always had its heretics, and it has for some time been persecuting them. Men are being sent to jail in England, while I write, for fidelity towards Christianity, and infidelity towards Science. The old religion bade men, when their friends were ill, to pray to the Man Outside in words. The new religion bids them to pray in drugs. And when they obey the old religion, and disobey the new, and their friends happen to die, the law sends them to prison. The new religion has won its way over the old by sheer business merit. Its spells are stronger than those of the old religion. They work better. They bind the Man Outside more surely. The prayers of the new religion are more often answered. The new prayers are more businesslike than the old, because they are written to please the Man Outside and not the Man Inside. And they use the language which the Man Outside seems to understand best, the language of deeds, not words. They are sincere prayers. They ask for what men really want, and not for what they pretend to want, or fear the Man Outside wants them to want. Hence they are not so often put up out of vanity, and so as to be heard of men, as the old prayers. Above all they are truthful prayers. They are It is significant that the new religion comes from the North. It breathes the sheer courage and intense love of life of those old Vikings who prayed to die in battle, and not a cow's death on the straw. It is on the whole the rebellion of the Baltic against the Mediterranean mind. For that reason the Idealist will not want it to end in the harsh conquest of the Mediterranean by the Baltic mind. We have heard too much of world religions. The world can do very well without another Catholic Church. The Northern folk are the White folk. What we are dealing with is the White Man's religion. By one of those Rhymes which the seeing eye sees everywhere, and which only stupefy the stupid eye, Nothing is more painful and bewildering to the White mind than what seems to it the reckless lying, the utter indifference to verihood, of the Black mind. That literature of the Black Age, those legends and romances, have not their very names become our words for falsehood; by a Roman tale, do we not mean a tale that is not supposed to be true? It is not till we come to the Icelandic sagas that we seem to find men making any effort at all to tell the story as it really might have happened. The grand mistake of the White mind has been to take the Black mind literally, or rather to mistake Letters for Things. The old painters who painted their heroes with yellow plates around their heads did not mean to tell us that they really went about wearing yellow plates, as a Frenchman wears "In connection with this occasion there is an incident on record which shows how deeply God resents an affront against the honour of his faithful servants. In a remote town of Spain a number of persons were discussing the recent canonisation, and remarking on the virtues and miracles of the saint, when an unhappy heretic, overhearing them, exclaimed—'You make very sure that the famous Duke of Gandia is in heaven, in spite of his absurd superstitions and miracles; rather than believe it I call on God to send me down to hell this moment, Now when the White Man reads tales like that they do him harm. But they do not harm Archbishop Gulielmus and Edwardus Kelly, S. J., and their friends. They understand them. All that is merely their Mediterranean way of saying that Francis Borgia was a very good man. It does not help us to think any better of this worthy Jesuit to be told that the earth opened in "a remote town" of Spain, and that a Baltic-minded man disappeared into the bowels of our planet; but it helps them. They do not mean that if we should speak disrespectfully of Archbishop Gulielmus the pavement of Dublin or elsewhere would open beneath our feet, and engulph us. If we should offer £8,000, or 8,000 times £8,000,000 to Archbishop Gulielmus on condition that the earth should open in some town not too remote to have a name, and engulph an unhappy heretic, he would answer quite fairly that we had not understood his little book. In the same way, when I lived in Dublin, my Black friends used to assure me that this very Archbishop Gulielmus could, if he wished, strike every heretic in the city dead. I am not sure if this power of his is even limited to his own diocese, but in any case it is formidable As soon as we leave off reading these old books as if they were newspapers published in New York, we shall begin to understand them. It is almost time, indeed, to leave off refuting and apologising, The words of the old prophets seem senseless enough to us, but so did other hieroglyphs till Champollion had found the key. And neither did the priests, nor did the prophets, write all they knew. Neither were they able to do so; neither is any man able to write all he knows. Somehow or other, it seems to me that those astrologers were weather-wise, that they foreknew that millennial ebb and flow of heat and light that was to dry up Lake Tchad and unfreeze the Baltic; that giant tidal wave in the sun that was to sweep the empire of Rome before it like an egg-shell, and wash up the wreckage of Thebes and Babel on the shores of Scandinavia. Their memorable prophecy has been memorably fulfilled. Some day we may be able to see in this the handwriting of the Man Outside, and to take to heart the tremendous Lesson. Some day we may be allowed to show the apologists for Christianity the meaning of the word Christ. In the meantime the pressing business seems to be to prevent the new shell from hardening. And it is hardening very fast. The new religion is to-day much more sure of itself than the old religion,THE ECLIPSE