Charles Dickens must be seen clearly as a representative Englishman, a spokesman of the so largely inarticulate English people, discerned towering above contemporaries as Sir Thomas More or Doctor Johnson is discerned. How, otherwise, can we explain the hatred of Dickens for Puritanism, and his distrust of all professions of Protestantism?

The immediate recognition of his genius is evidence that Dickens’s standpoint was understood and approved by the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and this standpoint is very definitely Christian. Of all our great novelists none is more definitely Christian.

Throughout his writings Dickens insists on the fundamental beliefs of Christendom. That God rules and orders the whole universe ; that mankind has an Eternal Father, and a Divine Redeemer and Saviour, His Son—these are facts that Dickens takes for granted in all his books. With all his zest for social reforms Dickens never assumes, after the fashion of certain of our latter-day novelists, that God being absent from the universe it is the business of the writer of popular fiction to order a new heaven and a new earth and prescribe a new religion for the children of men.