"I Believe" and other essays

BY GUY THORNE Author of “When it Was Dark,” “First it was Ordained,” “Made in His Image,” etc., etc.
LONDON F. V. WHITE & CO., Limited 14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C. 1907
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
DEDICATION To F. V. WHITE, Esquire.
My dear White, The publication of this book is a business arrangement between you and me. Its dedication however has nothing to do with the relations of author and publisher in those capacities, but is merely an expression of friendship and esteem. This then is to remind you of pleasant hours we have spent together on the other side of the channel, in your house at London, and my house in Kent.
Yours ever sincerely,
Guy Thorne.

“I BELIEVE”
When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father’s study, and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid flavour of Bishop Butler’s advertisement, prefixed to the First Edition of his Analogy , at an early age, and I have thought lately that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly modified the mental attitude.
Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was shortly to be “Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,” says about his literary contemporaries—