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    "I BELIEVE"

    AND OTHER ESSAYS

    BY

    GUY THORNE

    Author of "When it Was Dark," "First it was Ordained,"
    "Made in His Image," etc., etc.

    LONDON

    F. V. WHITE & CO., Limited
    14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.

    1907


    RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
    BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
    BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




CONTENTS


      I. "I BELIEVE"
     II. THE FIRES OF MOLOCH
    III. THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD
     IV. THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL
      V. THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT
     VI. VAGROM MEN
    VII. AN AUTHOR'S POST-BAG




DEDICATION

To F. V. WHITE, ESQUIRE.


MY DEAR WHITE,

The publication of this book is a business arrangement between you and
me. Its dedication however has nothing to do with the relations of
author and publisher in those capacities, but is merely an expression
of friendship and esteem. This then is to remind you of pleasant hours
we have spent together on the other side of the channel, in your house
at London, and my house in Kent.

Yours ever sincerely,

GUY THORNE.




"I BELIEVE"




I

"I BELIEVE"

"_Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision_."


When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father's study,
and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some
amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any
rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced
their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a
few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid
flavour of Bishop Butler's advertisement, prefixed to the First
Edition of his _Analogy_, at an early age, and I have thought lately
that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly
modified the mental attitude.

Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was
shortly to be "Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,"
says about his literary contemporaries--

"It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it
is now at length discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they
treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among
all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world."

Perhaps the difference between the times of George the Second and
Edward the Seventh may be best discerned in the status and calibre of
the popular penmen who in either age have found, or furnished
amusement in a tilt against the Catholic Faith.

The man in the street, as we know him, did not exist in the eighteenth
century. He is the predominant person to-day, and he requires the
services of able authors to assure him of immunity, when he is
inclined to frolic away from chastity or integrity, much as did the
county members who pocketed the bribes of Sir Robert Walpole and
prated of patriotism.

Fortunately for society the man in the street is a very decent fellow,
and generally finds out before long that Wisdom's ways are ways of
pleasantness. A man may enjoy posing as an agnostic when he wants an
excuse for--as the <DW64> said--"doing what he dam please," but when he
takes to himself a wife, and children are born to him, a certain
anxiety as to the continuity and perpetuation of these relationships
begins to show itself. A man who has lost a little child, or waited in
agonizing suspense to hear the physician's verdict, when sickness
overshadows his home, discovers that he needs something beyond
negations, something that will bring life and immortality to light
again within his soul.

Moreover, the man in the street finds it necessary to come to some
decision on other problems of existence. He is a citizen and must
needs exercise his enfranchisement and give his vote at an election
now and again. He must help to decide whether the State shall ignore
religion and establish a system of ethical education, of which the
ultimate sanction is social convenience, or maintain the thesis that
Creed and Character are mutually inter-dependent.

As he pays his poor rate wrathfully, or with resignation, its annual
increase reminds him of the necessity of curing or eliminating the
unfit. When he reads of Belgian and Prussian colonial enterprise, or
ponders on the perplexing problem of the Black Belt which the Southern
States must solve, he is compelled to consider whether it is true
that "God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all
the face of the earth," or whether this shall be accounted as another
of the delusions of Saul of Tarsus whom Governor Festus found to be
mad.

Indeed, our friend, the man in the street, when he becomes a family
man, without any pretensions to be a man of family, very often finds
himself face to face with other problems. Shall he simply sing with
the Psalmist "Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are
the young children. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them," or shall he be guided by the gloss of a modern interpreter who
maintains that the oriental quiver was designed to hold but two or
three arrows at most?

Even when the plain man confines his interests to his business and
seeks relaxations in "sport" alone, endeavouring to evade the puzzles
of politics and avoid all theologized inquiry, he cannot escape from
ethical consideration. Professionalism in athletics and questions of
betting and bribery contend with his conviction that there is
something which ennobles man in running and striving for mastery, and
it is futile to curse the bookmaker when his clients are so many, his
occupation so lucrative