A Lost Cause

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1905
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
A few words are necessary in preface to this story. After When It Was Dark made its appearance, the writer received a great number of letters from his readers, and up to the present moment he still continues to receive them.
Out of nearly two hundred communications, a large proportion are concerned not so much with the main issue of the tale, as with controversial matters in the Church of England arising from it.
It was pointed out to him that while the extreme Protestant party was constantly employing fiction as a method of propaganda, churchmen were almost unrepresented in this way. The Catholic Faith has been bitterly assailed over and over again in books which are well enough written, and have sufficient general interest to appeal to the man of the world, who is often indifferent to the points debated.
After considerable discussion, the writing of A Lost Cause was resolved upon. The author desires to thank those priests who have assisted him with their counsel and experience, and begs leave to explain here something of his aims in publishing the tale.
At no period in modern Church history has the Church been assailed with such malignance, slander, and untruth as at the present. Protestantism within the Church is a lost cause, it is dying, and for just this reason the clamour is loudest, the misrepresentation more furious and envenomed. Shrewd opportunists are taking their last chance of emerging from obscurity by an appeal to the ignorance of the general public on Church matters. Looking round us, we see dozens of uneducated and noisy nobodies who have elected themselves into a sort of irregular prelacy and dubbed themselves Defenders of the Faith, with about as much right as Napoleon crowned himself emperor.
Church people do not take them very seriously. Their voices are like the cries of hedge-birds by the road, on which the stately procession of the Church is passing. But the man in the street is more attentive and he enjoys the colour and movement of iconoclasm. He believes also that the brawlers have right on their side.