The World’s Tragedy

PREFACE. V cised by scholars again and again. You accept all the criticisms up to 1611 and reject all later. Why ? THE P. B. — There is a place prepared for the devil and his angels to which you (my poor dear brother) will most surely go ! Why not simply accept Christ as your Saviour and Lord ? (Then he gets started ; and the rest must be heard to be believed). So — is it a type of all logic ? — their simple Yea and Nay became more casuistical than Dens or Escobar, and their strict adhesion to the Commands of the Bible became a mere loosening of the strings of conscience. An irreligious man may have moral checks ; a Plymouth Brother has none. He is always ready to excuse the vilest crimes by quoting the appropriate text, and invoking the name of Christ to cover every meanness which may delight his vain and vicious nature. For the Plymouth Brethren were in themselves an excep- tionally detestable crew. The aristocrats who began the movement were of course just aristocrats, and their curious system left them so. But they ran a form of “ Early Christian ” Spiritual Socialism, by having no appointed priest or minister, and they were foolish enough to favour their followers financially. Thus Mr. Giblets — let us call him — the third-best butcher in the village found (on the one hand) that while at church he was nobody at all, and in the chapel and elder, in the little meeting in the Squire’s morning-room he was no less