this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and folios and flying sheets of reams, printed before and since on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou help us to embody the Divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live? What! thou hast no faculty of that kind? Only a torch for burning and no hammer for building?—Take our thanks then—and thyself away!"
The theologian and the lay thinker alike must
follow with keen interest the arguments of Theos
Alwyn against atheism, materialism, and, what
Miss Corelli calls, Paulism. Uncompromisingly
should those writers be denounced who take immorality
for their theme, and achieve considerable
sales thereby. The declarations of Alwyn are of
particular interest because in them expression is
given to many of Marie Corelli's own views on
sacred things. The man or woman who is bewildered
by the quarrels of the religious sects of these
days, and whose bewilderment is increased by the
teachings of the cynics, may well exclaim with
Alwyn what a howling wilderness this world
would be if given over entirely to materialism, and
conclude with him that, if it were, scarce a line of
