love, hope, conscience, and reverence, will always seek to find reflec tions of themselves in the unseen world. Hence faith has diminished and charity increased. Fewer believe old creeds, and those who do, believe more faintly; while fewer denounce them, and are insensible to the good they have done in the past and the truth and beauty of the essential ideas that underlie them.

On the Continent, and especially in Catholic countries, where religion interferes more with politics and social life, there is still a large amount of active hostility to it, as shown by the massacre of priests by the French Communists; but, in this country, the old Voltairean infidelity has died out, and no one of ordinary culture thinks of denouncing Christianity as an invention of priestcraft. On the contrary, many of our leading minds are at the same time sceptical and religious, and exemplify the truth of another profound saying of Tennyson:

There is more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

The change which has come over modern thought cannot be better exemplified than by taking the instance of three great writers whose works have produced a powerful influence-Carlyle, Renan, and George Eliot. They were all three born and brought up in the very beart of different phases of the old beliefs-Carlyle, in a family which might be taken as a type of the best qualities of Scottish Presbyterianism, bred in a West country farmhouse, under the eye of a father and mother whom he loved and revered, who might have been the originals of Burns' "Cotter's Saturday Night," or the descendants of the martyrs of Claverhouse. His own temperament strongly inclined to a stern Puritanical piety; his favorite heroes were Cromwell and John Knox; his whole nature was antipathetic to science. As his biographer, Froude, reports of him, "He liked ill men like Humboldt, Laplace, and the author of the 'Vestiges.' He refused Darwin's transmutation of species as unproved; he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded that it might turn out true." And yet the delibrate conclusion at which he arrived was that "He did not think it possible that educated honest men could even profess much longer to believe in historical Christianity."

The case of Renan was equally remarkable. He was born in the cottage of Breton peasants of the purest type of simple, pious, Catholic faith. Their one idea of rising above the life of a peasant was to become a priest, and their great ambition for their boy was that he might be so far honored as one day to become a country curé. Young Renan, accordingly, from the first day he showed cleverness, and got to the top of his class in the village school, was destined for the priesthood. He was taken in hand by priests, and found in them his kindest friends; they sent him to college, and in due time to the Central Seminary where young men were trained for orders. All his traditions, all his affections, all his interests, led in that direction, and yet he gave up everything rather than subscribe to what he no longer believed to be true. His conversion was brought about in this way. Having been appointed assistant to a professor of Hebrew he became a profound scholar in Oriental languages; this led to his studying the Scriptures carefully in the original, and the conclusion forced itself upon him that the miraculous part of the narrative had no historical foundation. Like Carlyle, the turn of his mind was not scientific, and

while denying miracles he remained keenly appreciative of all that was beautiful and poetical in the life and teaching of Jesus, which he has brought more vividly before the world in his writings than had ever been done by orthodox commentators.

George Eliot, again, was brought up in yet another phase of orthodox Christianity-that of middle-class nonconformist Evangelicalism. She embraced this creed fervently, and, as we see in her "Dinah," retained a keen appreciation of all its best elements. But as her intellect expanded and her knowledge widened, she too found it impossible to rest in the old belief, and, with a painful wrench from a revered father and loving friends, she also passed over from the ranks of orthodoxy. She also, after a life of profound and earnest thought, came to the conclusion recorded of her by an intimate friend and admirer, Mr. Myers:

"I remember how at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of menthe words God, Immortality, Duty-pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the law of sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates."

Such instances as these cannot be the result of mere accident. As long as scepticism was confined to a limited number of scientific men it might be possible to think that it was merely the exaggeration of a particular train of thought pursued too exclusively. But when science has become the prevailing mode of thought, and has been brought home to the minds of all educated persons, it is no longer possible to represent it as an exceptional aberration. And where the bell-wethers of thought lead the way the flock will follow. What the greatest thinkers think to-day, the mass of thinkers will think to-morrow, and the great army of non-thinkers will assume to be self-evident the day after. This is very nearly the case at the present day; the great thinkers have gone before, the mass of thinkers have followed, and the still greater mass of non-thinkers are wavering and about to follow. It is no longer, with those who think at all, a question of absolute faith against absolute disbelief, but of the more or less shade of "faintness" with which they cling to the "larger hope."

This is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of those who attempt to stem the tide which sets so strongly against orthodoxy. They resolve themselves mainly into one long wail of "oh the pity of it, the pity of it!" if the simple faith of olden times should disappear from the world. They show eloquently and conclusively that science and philosophy cannot satisfy the aspirations or afford the consolations of religion. They expose the hollowness of the substitutes which have been proposed, such as the worship of the unknowable, or the cult of humanity. They win an easy triumph over the exaggerations of those who resolve all the historical records of Christianity into myths or fabulous fulfilment of prophecies, and they wage fierce battles over minor points, as whether the first quotations from the Gospels are met

with in the first or second half of the second century. But they nowhere attempt to grapple with the real difficulties, and show that the facts and arguments which converted men like Carlyle and Renan are mistaken facts and unsound arguments. Attempts to harmonize the Gospels and to prove the inspiration of writings which contain manifest errors and contradictions, have gone the way of Buckland's proof of a universal deluge, and of Hugh Miller's attempt to reconcile Noah's ark and the Genesis account of creation with the facts of geology and astronomy. Not an inch of ground that has been conquered by science has ever been reconquered in fair fight by theology.

This great scientific movement is of comparatively recent date. Darwin's "Origin of Species" was only published in 1859, and his views as to evolution, development, natural selection, and the prevalence of universal law, have already annexed nearly the whole world of modern thought and become the foundation of all philosopical speculation and scientific inquiry.

Not only has faith been shaken in the supernatural as a direct and immediate agent in the phenomena of the worlds of matter and of life, but the demonstration of the "struggle for life" and "survival of the fittest" has raised anew, and with vastly augmented force, those questions as to the moral constitution of the universe and the origin of evil, which have so long exercised the highest minds. Is it true that "love" is "Creation's final law," when we find this enormous and apparently prodigal waste of life going on; these cruel internecine battles between individuals and species in the struggle for existence; this cynical indifference of Nature to suffering? There are, approximately, 3,600 millions of deaths of human beings in every century, of whom at least 20 per cent., or 720 millions, die before they have attained to clear self-consciousness and conscience. What becomes of them? Why were they born? Are they Nature's failures, and "cast as rubbish to the void?"

To such questions there is no answer. We are obliged to admit that as the material universe is not, as we once fancied, measured by our standards and regulated at every turn by an intelligence resembling ours; so neither is the moral universe to be explained by simply magnifying our own moral ideas, and explaining everything by the action of a Being who does what we should have done in his place. If we insist on this anthropomorphic conception we are driven to this dilemma. Carlyle bases his belief in a God, "the infinite Good One," on this argument: "All that is good, generous, wise, right-whatever I deliberately and for ever love in others and myself, who or what could by any possibility have given it to me but One who first had it to give? This is not logic; this is axiom."

But how of the evil? No sincere man looking into the depths of his own soul, or at the facts of the world around, can doubt that along with much that is good, generous, wise, and right, there is much that is bad, base, foolish, and wrong. If logic compels us to receive as an axiom a good author for the former, does not the same logic equally compel us to accept the axiom that the author of the latter must have been one who "first had it in himself to give?" That is, we must accept the theory of a God who is half good, half evil; or adopt the Zoroastrian conception of a universe contested by an Ormuzd and Ahriman, a good and evil principle, whose power is, for the present at any rate, equally balanced.

From this dilemma there is no escape, unless we give up altogether the idea of an anthropomorphic deity, and adopt frankly the scientific idea of a First Cause, inscrutable and past finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace, but of whose real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect or faintly discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and evil a necessary condition of existence. This is a more sublime as well as more rational belief than the old orthodox conception; but there is no doubt that it requires more strength of mind to embrace it, and that it appears cold and cheerless to those who have been accustomed to see special providences in every ordinary occurrence, and to fancy themselves the special objects of supernatural supervision in all the details of daily life. Hopes and fancies, however, are powerless against facts; and the world is as surely passing from the phase of orthodox into that of scientific belief as youth is passing into manhood, and the planet which we inhabit from the fluid and fiery state into that of temperate heat, progressive cooling, and final extinction as the abode of life. In the meantime, what can we do but possess our souls in patience, follow truth wherever it leads us, and trust, as Tennyson advises, that in the long run everything will be for the best, and "every winter turn to spring?"

The decay of old religious beliefs, and the introduction of new conceptions based on scientific discovery, have given rise to many attempts to found new philosophies, and in some cases new sects and religions, of some of the principal of which a short account may be given.

One of the greatest thinkers of modern times, Herbert Spencer, has expanded the theories of modern science, specially those of the conservation of energy and of Darwinian evolution, into a generalized philosophy, embracing not only the phenomena of the material and living universe, but also history, religion, politics, and all the complex relations of social life. He starts from the principle that throughout the universe, in general and in detail, there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and motion. This shows itself as evolution where there is a predominant aggregation of matter and diminution of motion, and as dissolution where matter is disintegrated and motion increased. Thus, in the formation of coal, the motion of the sun's rays is fixed in the condensed matter of the chemical products of vegetation, and is dissipated when, after countless ages, the coal is burned and its substance dissolved into its elements. These changes constitute a transformation of the uniform or homogeneous into the differentiated or heterogeneous, as seen in the condensation of nebulous or cosmic matter into suns and planets; in the varied elements of the inorganic world; "in each organism, vegetable or animal; in the aggregate of organisms, thought and geologic time; in the mind; in society; in all products of social activity." These changes are all in the direction of passing from an indefinite whole to definite parts, and they are inevitable, unless the original substance were so absolutely uniform as to be absolutely stable.

Once started, this process of differentiation tends necessarily to go on, the surrounding conditions being ever at work, whether by aggregation or dissolution, by joining like to like, or separating unlike from unlike, to sharpen and make more definite existing differences.

This is in effect a generalized conception of Darwin's laws of the

"struggle for life" and "survival of the fittest." Finally, however, the result of all these changes is that an ultimate equilibrium is reached, which is rest in the inorganic and death in the organic world; as when the sun with all its planets shall have parted with all its heat, and all its energy shall have run down to one uniform level. From this state it can only be roused by some fresh shock from without, dissipating it again into a mass of diffused matter and unbalanced motions.

Hence we come to the final statements of the Spencerian philosophy, as given in the words of its author:

"This rhythm of evolution and dissolution, completing itself during short periods in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates distributed through space completing itself in periods which are immeasurable by human thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal, each alternating phase of the process predominating, now in this region of space and now in that, as local conditions determine. All these phenomena, from their great features even to their minutest details, are necessary results of the persistence of force under its forms of matter and motion. Given these as distributed through space, and their quantities being unchangeable either by increase or decrease, there inevitably result the continuous redistributions distinguishable as evolution and dissolution, as well as those special traits above enumerated. That which persists, unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which tne universe presents to us, transcends human knowledge and conception, is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recog nize as without limit in space and without beginning or end in time.'

This is, in its highest form, the philosophy of Agnosticism. A very different thing, be it observed, from Atheism, for it distinctly recognizes an underlying power which, although "unknown and unknowable," may be anything harmonizing with the feelings and aspirations in which all religious sentiment has its origin, so long as it fulfils the condition of not, by too precise definition, coming into collision with something which is not "unknown" but "known" and irreconcilable with it.

For instance, there is nothing in Agnosticism to negative the possibility of a future state of existence. Behind the veil there may be anything, and no one can say that individual consciousness may not remain or be restored after death, and that our condition may not be in some way better or worse, according to the use we have made of the opportunities of life. But if any one attempts to define this future state and say we shall have spiritual bodies, live in the skies, sing psalms, and wave palm-branches, we say at once "this is partly unknowable and partly known to be impossible."

These abstract speculations, however, are only adapted for a few of the highest thinkers. That which has given the philosophy of Spencer a wide influence is the manner in which he applies these general principles to the subjects which more immediately concern the mass of thinking minds, such as history, politics, and the problems of social life. What Darwin shows in animal life and the origin of species, Spencer traces in the rise and fall of empires, the growth and decline of religions, the increasing complexity of social relations, the conflicting forces of evolution and dissolution at work around us in our everyday life, in the relations of science and theology, capital and labor, state socialism and laissez-faire. For instance, the decline of the Roman