titillated more than it tingled. _Robert Elsmere_ I suppose we should
all agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question,
the most effective and popular novel we have had since _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_."

A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the
popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our Western people are
like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written
for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross
exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive
interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism."

Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West,
after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after its
publication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolution
of a nation."

Goldwin Smith--my father's and uncle's early friend--wrote me from
Canada:

The Grange, Toronto, _Oct. 31, 1888._

My dear Mrs. Ward,--You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are
making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and
by learning that the antidote to you is _Ben-Hur_. I am afraid, if
it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote.

The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that
to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a
model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part