Having been born and brought up in an atmosphere of strict Conservative tradition--conservative in a religious and social sense alike--I had unconsciously assumed in effect, if not in so many words, that any revolt or protest against the established order was indeed an impertinence, but was otherwise of no great import. Accordingly, my temperament being that of an instinctive poet, the object of my earliest ambitions was to effect within a very limited circle (for the idea of popular literature never entered my head) a radical change in the poetic taste of England, and restore it to what it had been in the classical age of Pope. But, as I left childhood behind me and approached maturer youth I gradually came to realize that the whole order of things--literary, religious, and social--which the classical poetry assumed, and which I had previously taken as impregnable, was being assailed by forces which it was impossible any longer to ignore. Threats of social change, indeed, in any radical sense continued for a long time to affect me merely as vague noises in the street, which would now and again interrupt polite conversation, and presently die away, having seriously altered nothing; but the attack on orthodox religion seemed to me much more menacing, and was rarely absent from the sphere of my adolescent thought. The attacking parties I still looked on as ludicrous, but I began to fear them as formidable; and they were for me rendered more formidable still by the very unfortunate fact that the defenders of orthodoxy seemed to me, in respect of their tactics, to be hardly less ludicrous than their opponents. The only way in which the former could successfully make good their defense was--such was my conclusion--by appeal to common experience: by showing how supernatural religion was implicit in all civilized life, and how grotesque and tragic would be the ruin in which such life would collapse if supernatural faith were eliminated.
Such, as I have explained already, was the moral of my four early books, _The New Republic_, _The New Paul and Virginia_, _Is Life Worth Living?_ and _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_. All these attempts at attacking modern atheistic philosophy were based on a demonstration of its results, and appealed not so much to pure religious emotion as to the intellect, a sense of humor, and what is called a knowledge of the world.