Great and manifold-to speak with the translators of the Bible-as have been the mischiefs wrought by modern unbelief, it may be questioned whether any have surpassed the evils of the reaction which it has too often called forth. "Agnostic, positivist, materialist," are doubtless words of ill omen; but "hysterical, irrational, obscurantist" have scarcely a more promising sound. Between the Montagues and the Capulets of these extremes, fighting over her body, Religion seems likely to emerge disfigured and discredited-a caricature of the sublime and affecting reality which she once was, and as much an offence to her friends as to her enemies. The man who has escaped without a wound from Professor Huxley's onslaught may fall a victim to Miss Corelli's "electric creed;" or if not the man, yet the woman, though doctors have been known to succumb, and journalists, despite the triple steel of their art of criticism. And who shall reckon the misunderstandings which a romance so singularly fantastic as Mr. Hall Caine's

1. A Romance of Two Worlds. And other Works. By Marie Corelli. London, 1896-1897.

2 The Christian. By Hall Caine, London, 1897.

"The Christian" will have created in the hundred thousand students it has won-persons innocent or careless enough to suppose that his novel is a dogmatic treatise drawn from the fountain-head of knowledge, and that his monks, canons, prophets, and missionaries live and move outside his chapters, in Eaton Square and in Bishopsgate Street? The so-called "bankruptcy of science," whatever lesson it may convey to professors overstepping the bounds of their method and its lawful acquisitions, would be dearly purchased by the degradation of Christianity. Religion is a reasonable service, not hysteria and not clap-trap. But the works which we have taken in hand to review insist that it is both. Deny them their hysteria, they would be destitute of force; forbid them their claptrap, and where would be their influence? A bold critic has thrown aside in disdain the novels of Miss Corelli, describing them as "ignorant and illiterate." We propose to make good this indictment. Mr. Hall Caine tells us that in "The Christian" his desire has been "to depict, however imperfectly, the types of mind and char

acter, of creed and culture, of social effort and religious purpose," which he thinks he sees "in the life of England and America at the close of the nineteenth century." We will ask with Horace, "Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu?” How much of the current religion, social effort, and prevailing culture has been expressed in "The Christian?" And must we conIclude that Mr. Hall Caine, as well as Miss Corelli, has, under pretence of showing us the orthodox creed in action, flooded the market with samples of unscientific and degenerate mysticism?

Place aux dames! Let us begin with Miss Marie Corelli. She is now celebrated as the author of half-a-dozen volumes, multiplied in editions beyond our counting, which affect to promulgate the faith once delivered to the saints. They contain her dogmas and are the prophetical lectures of a London Hypatia, who does not blush when flattering judges tell her that she has written "the Gospel story, glorified, quickened, transfigured, stamped with an awful reality, instinct with life not before known." With incomparable modesty she suffers this praise to be printed in her volume called "Barabbas;" nay, more, she allows it to reach the following culmination, "What then? Is it inconceivable that the powerful pen of a cultured woman of genius should write a more potent picture of the World's Tragedy than was written by the fishermen of Judea?" other words, the inspired record itself must pale before what an irreverent critic has termed "the aniline dyes of Miss Corelli's eloquence," and she does not refuse to be honored as a fifth Evangelist, superior to the other four.

In

But, when she was writing her preface to "A Romance of Two Worlds," she seemed willing to stand on a level with these fishermen. For it is surely her own office which she magnifies in

the observation, "If ever there was a time for a new apostle of Christ to arise and preach his grandly simple message anew, that time is now." The message, in its grand simplicity, thou, "Heliobas, atavis edite regibus"-king, sage, and Chaldean-dost republish in a creed which extends over twentytwo pages! But the new commandment in which its issues may be reduced to a single line, "Cultivate the Electric Spirit within you." Why "electric," the reader may inquire. Because, answers Heliobas magisterially, God is. "a Shape of pure Electric Radiance," and if any doubt it, they "may search the Scriptures on which they pin their faith, and they will find that all the visions and appearances of the Deity there chronicled were electric in character." Neither the Chaldean nor Miss Corelli can understand why some have thought her electric dogma blasphe mous, or how it should be a contradiction to affirm of the Deity in one sentence that He is a pure Spirit, and in the next that He is an emanation of electricity with a definite and measurable shape. Her creed, she declares, "has its foundation in Christ alone," and "its tenets are completely borne out by the New Testament." Moreover, the theory "is simple and makes all marvels easy"-without the inconvenience, we hasten to add, of being compelled to study mathematics, or define your terms, or distinguish between a current that runs along a wire and the intellect and will that have nothing in common with these imponderable agencies.

No, Miss Corelli's science, like her religion, scorns the fetters of philosophy and fact. When she has baptized a power "electric" she leaves it to explain itself. Sometimes it is a force, "tout comme une autre," and gives people a smart shock; anon it is "the germ of the Divinity within them," which is "capable of the high

est clairvoyance and spiritual ability.” We must take care not to confound it with hypnotism, for that, as we learn, "is merely animal magnetism called by a new name." The trance of the hypnotized is a "stupor;" but Miss Corelli's trance perceives the "Central Planet"-in her language a star and a planet are all one-shows her that "everything is circular;" makes angels and demons a "matter of experience"; conducts her heroes up from the earth to Saturn, Jupiter, and the Centre, but does not land them in the moon, for the best of reasons: there is no moon -nothing except an "electrograph" which hangs delusively in heaven and somehow contrives to exert an influence on the tides. However, we should bear in mind that "the sea is impregnated with electricity." So, indeed, are all other objects, and the Electric Circle "can do anything," which will surely account for the Swedenborgian visions that enable Miss Corelli's adepts to believe exactly in proportion as they have seen, to widen the bounds of celestial geography, and to put to shame the mere astronomer, whose telescope fails where ecstasy is triumphant, and will-power ascends the spheres.

And so, let us only cherish these germs, and we have Miss Corelli's word for it that we shall behold the spirits as they float round our terrestrial globe-after which, what becomes of atheism and the atheists? For seeing is certainly believing, though we used to be told that it was not Christian faith. Moreover, if the doctrine of Heliobas may not be called spiritualism somewhat diluted with electricity-always conceived in these volumes as a "fluid"-would it be permissable to number it with magic and "miracle-mongering"? We gather from his wonderful sister, Zara, who has a zone of the deadly force at her disposal, that "it is nothing new;" of

course, it "was well known to the ancient Chaldeans," whose date and other achievements are left in a tantalizing obscurity; and "it was practised in perfection by Christ and His disciples." But, alas, “civilized beings have forgotten all this." There is not one of them, our author observes mournfully, that can so much as emulate "the human savage" or "lay back his ears to the wind, catch a faint faroff sound with certainty and precision, and tell you what it is." Hence, we must not be surprised, though we may be sorry, to learn that "they have forgotten the use of the electrical organs they all indubitably possess in large or minute degree."

The miracles of the New Testament would seem, therefore, on this evidence, to be all reducible to a series of torpedo shocks; Christianity is a store of electric fluid; the risen Christ was Himself "embodied electric force;" "the descent of the Holy Ghost, by which term is meant an ever-flowing current of the inspired working intelligence of the Creator, was purely electric in character;" and "we believe"-that is to say, Miss Corelli believes-"that since Christ ascended into Heaven, our electric communication with the Creator has been established." Again, lest we should imagine these terms to be simple or crude analogies taken from earthly things"Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein' Gleichniss," Goethe would say, but not so Heliobas-we are distinctly informed that "every thought and word of every inhabitant on every planet is reflected in lightning language before the Creator's eyes as easily as ve receive telegrams." And yet, concludes Miss Corelli, with a tremor in her voice, the Electric Creed "has been much commented upon, and by some deemed blasphemous-I know not why." Does her New Testament, we would ask, liken the Almighty to a man sitting in

a post-office, receiving telegrams at a central station? And is that her view of omniscience? Who would not prefer the agnostic, that hesitates to declare there is knowledge with the Most High, to this grotesque and vulgar reminiscence of Swedenborg, which attempts to fathom divine mysteries by means of its "lightning language" and its "spiritual electricity?" Is the Supreme, after all, nothing but a "magnified non-natural man," whose abode is on some "central planet," which may be discovered if we travel far enough in a motor-car? Truly, should these things find general acceptance, the refutation of materialism that ended in a gigantic electromagnetic coil would be little else than a casting out of Satan by Beelzebub.

In sober earnest, Miss Corelli knows not what is meant by materialism; and as regards her Christianity, it is a debased offspring of the Neo-Platonic school daubed with the colors of a hundred superstitions. It has not come out of the New Testament. Its origin and history may be traced through heresies without number; and the faith which it involves or demands is, in spite of her vehement protestations, the result of an hysteria so hollow and earth-born that it does not add one syllable to our knowledge of things divine. "Nel ciel...fu'io," sings the Italian poet. Heliobas never was there. When Miss Corelli assures her correspondents that she knows the Electrical Creed to be a matter of experience, what are we to think? Has a single one of her acquaintance penetrated to the Central Planet? Or beheld the nations in Saturn and Jupiter? The amazing fact is that any reader should have taken "A Romance of Two Worlds" seriously. But then readers took Lemuel Gulliver seriously And here is a clergyman of the Church of England writing to Miss Corelli that her imaginary voyage has preserved him from

suicide. The end does not justify the means; one can but exclaim with Persius, "Quantum in rebus inane!" and marvel at the credulity of an enlightened British public.

But this "Romance" it was which announced to mystics, decadents and lovers of religious sensation that a new prophetess had arisen, a mother in Israel. Her mission was to preach against unbelievers, to pursue them with a flood of words, and to appeal from their arguments to the old experience, as she deemed it, whereby the electric current was proved orthodox and the atomic theory an invention of Satan. Mysterious, indeed, are the differences that lurk in names and qualities. It is not easy to perceive how magnetism should be Christian, or electricity a thirteenth article of the Creed, or in what way "atoms" and "molecules" have sinned that they should call forth, as they ever do, the bitter scorn of Miss Marie Corelli. There is really nothing more sacred in energies which cannot be weighed than in molecules which submit themselves to the balance. Both are material, neither spiritual. And if we are going to deify the elements, or the forces behind them, why should not a second story-teller sing the praises of divine phosphorus, since without phosphorus we cannot reason or dedicate a volume of hymns to the carbon which is said to be an invariable constituent of organic life? Such undue favor shown to electricity gives Hellobas a suspicious resemblance to the Roman augur, whom Juvenal defines as "aliquis senior qui publica fulgura condit." An astronomical Christianity may prefer this kind of lightning-rod for its minister; but how if the present craze about microbes should set up a biological religion, which, after all, comes nearer to our business and bosoms? Hellobas must then yield to a public officer of health,