Introduction
tracted no attention whatever. I am inclined to think that by far the greater part of the edition was pulped.
This was eighteen years ago. I have glanced over the book again and find no single article that I would wish to recant. Everything that I hated in 1906 I hate now; if possible, with greater heartiness. But the old fighting spirit has gone from me. I realize definitely that I belong to the beaten cause; not so much theologically as materially. Popular Protestantism, it seems likely, will behave in every respect after the fashion of the toadstool to which Mr. Chesterton compared it. It will deliquesce and drip and cease to be. There may be an unpleasant mess for a while, but that will pass. But the dreadful wheel of material progress will not cease to revolve, and to that wheel all the world is bound, willy-nilly.
In America, as I suppose, the wheel has gone much faster than here in England. Still, we do what we can; we follow in your steps; as if the village idiot were to do his best to imitate the antics and con-
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