Ever since with the beginning of Christendom a new soul entered the body of exhausted Europe, it is true to say that we have not only had a certain idea but been haunted by it, as by a ghost. It is the idea crystallized in legends like those of St. Christopher and St. Martin. But it is equally apparent in the most modern ethics and eloquence, as, for instance, when a French atheist orator urged the reconsideration of a criminal case by pointing at the pictured Crucifixion which hangs in a French Law Court and saying: "VoilÀ la chose jugÉe." It is the idea when that oppressing the lowest we may actually be oppressing the highest, and that not even impersonally, but personally. We may be, as it were, the victims of a divine masquerade; and discover that the greatest of kings can travel incognito.

Such a picture, therefore, as the cartoonist has drawn here can be found in all ages of Christian history as a comment on contemporary oppression. But while the central figure remains always the same, the types of the tyrant and the mocker hold our temporary attention; for they are sketched from life and with a living exactitude. Upon one of them especially it would be easy to say a great deal: the grinning Prussian youth with the spectacles and the monkey face, who is using a Prussian helmet instead of the crown of thorns.

Such a scientific gutter-snipe is the real and visible fruit of organized German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that can come from the congestion of the pagan with the parvenu; all the knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something which always accompanies real atheism—arrested development.

G. K. CHESTERTON.