THEOPHOBIA: ITS CAUSE 43 



known the demands of real Christianity as put 

 forward by the Catholic Church, is it likely that 

 they will cleave to a faith which apparently 

 engenders such absurdities as the Christmas 

 pudding episode ? It is, indeed, as Father Was- 

 mann says, a thousand pities that the reasonable- 

 ness, the logic, the dignity of the Catholic religion 

 should remain for ever hidden from the eyes and 

 minds of many who so often are as they are, 

 because they were brought up as they were. In 

 all these things we find the key to another pro- 

 blem. In another essay in this volume I have 

 called attention to the glad intelligence, as it 

 seems to a certain school of writers, that we are 

 freed from the " bugbear of sin," as one of them 

 puts it ; able to enjoy ourselves without any 

 thoughts of that kind. 



Now I cannot but believe that such writers are 

 thinking of the bugbear of artificial sins invented 

 by the professors of a gloomy creed of religion. 

 It is not to be supposed that any serious writer 

 and those to whom I allude are eminently such 

 would speak or write with pleasure and satisfaction 

 of escaping from the bugbear of sins against 

 morality or against one's neighbour ; from the 

 bugbear of dishonesty or theft ; of taking away a 

 person's character ; of running away with his 

 wife. I am convinced that it is the invented 

 crimes of card-playing, theatre-going, and the 

 like to which they are alluding : it could not 

 surely be otherwise ; and that makes it all the more 

 unfortunate that before misusing a technical 

 term like the word " sin ? " and thus perhaps mis- 



