The writing of these works, the first of which I had begun while I was still an undergraduate, occupied about six or seven years. Meanwhile, side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new political gospels seemed to me no less dangerous, and also no less absurd, than those which I had previously attacked in the gospel of atheistic philosophy, and my attention being forcibly diverted from religious problems to social, I devoted myself to the writing of my first political work, _Social Equality_ (published 1882), in which all questions of religion were for the moment set aside. In my novel _The Old Order Changes_, published four or five years later, the religious problem and the social problem are united, and an attempt is made to suggest the general terms on which the ideals of a true Conservatism may be harmonized with those of an enlightened Socialism. As a result of my political writings, I was asked, and with certain reservations I consented, to become a candidate for a Scotch constituency.
Between the years 1890 and 1895 I turned again to social politics pure and simple in two books, the first of which was _Labor and the Popular Welfare_, the second being _Aristocracy and Evolution_.
My dealings with social politics being for the time exhausted, I devoted about five years--1895 to 1900--to the composition of three novels, _A Human Document_, _The Heart of Life_, and _The Individualist_, which were studies of the relation of religion to the passions, feelings, and foibles of which for most men the experiences of life consist.
Between the years 1900 and 1907 I published four works on the relation of religious dogmas to philosophy and scientific knowledge--namely, _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_--this volume relating to the Anglican controversies of the time--_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, _The Veil of the Temple_, and _The Reconstruction of Belief_, to which may be added a novel called _An Immortal Soul_.[4]