44 THEOPHOBIA AND NEMESIS 



leading some young and ardent mind, such 

 writers could not follow Father Wasmann's advice 

 and study some simple manual of Catholic ethics, 

 from which they would learn the real doctrine 

 of Christianity and would discover how very 

 different a thing it is and how very much more 

 reasonable than the distorted caricature which 

 we have been studying. 



2. THEOPHOBIA I ITS NEMESIS 



Whether my view as to the cause, or one of the 

 causes, is right or not, the fact remains that by 

 the mid- Victorian period England had fallen t 

 a very large extent a prey to materialism. Many 

 people attribute the sudden onslaught of this to 

 the publication of The Origin of Species and the 

 controversies of the foolish which followed there- 

 on. Samuel Butler, that brilliant writer who has 

 not even yet come into his own, sums up in his 

 novel The Way of All Flesh (and it may in- 

 cidentally be remarked, in himself) most of the 

 characteristics of the day. Many a parsonage home 

 like that of the Rev. iTheobald Pontifex existed in 

 those days, and more than one Ernest Pontifex 

 emerged from them. Now in this book Butler 

 states that " the year 1858 was the last of a term 

 during which the peace of the Church of England 

 was singularly unbroken," and there no doubt he is 

 right ; " The Evangelical Movement . . . had 

 become almost a matter of ancient history. 

 Tractarianism had subsided into a tenth-day's 

 wonder , it was at work ? but it was not noisy." 



