It has been reserved for our own age—the age of wireless telegraphy, of ships like floating towns, of monopoly, of millionaires and of mammoth beauty-choruses, the age in which four out of every five get it and in which no man may afford the handicap of unattractive teeth—it has been reserved, I say, for this age of ours to produce a heresy which eclipses all heresies.

We have seen the savage Puritanism of the Commonwealth, when men denied that the worship and service of God could be other than things of gloom and horror. We have seen the cold, dispassionate rationalism of the age of Voltaire, when faith was contemptuously dismissed as mere superstition and when the continued presence of Our Lord upon earth was spurned as a childish fable. We have seen a revival of Manichaeism, though nowadays they call it Christian Science. A new Puritanism has initiated and directed the Prohibition movement in America; and has made it illegal to sell cigarettes in the state of Kansas and elsewhere. We have seen, at one time or another, every article of the Christian Faith denied by men who called themselves Christians. We have seen God’s Vicar on Earth locked up like a dangerous criminal, ridiculed, insulted and despised. And now the crowning horror is upon us; I have seen it blatant and unashamed in America, though I believe it has not yet crossed the Atlantic. But it will come. For it has behind it the power of American finance.

Few things are more nauseating nowadays than all the modern cant about the Ideals of Big Business, Efficient Salesmanship, Truth in Advertising and all the rest of the nonsense.