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634 free thought we are amused with the buoyant audacity of the "young idea." Yet even there we find many a passage which calls forth the sincerest sympathy. Take, for instance, the following:

There are few reflective persons who have not been, now and again, impressed with awe as they looked back on the past of humanity. . . . It is then that we see the grandest illustrations of that unending necessity under which, it would seem, man labors, the necessity of abandoning ever and again the heritage of his fathers,. . . of continually leaving behind him the citadel of faith and peace, raised by the piety of the past, for an atmosphere of tumult and denial. . . . Whatever may be our present conclusions about Christianity, we can not too often remember that it has been one of the most important factors in the life of mankind."

This is touching enough—though perhaps the stolid aggressiveness which knows, as yet, no relentings, is really a far more tragic spectacle. But there are other lamentations, uttered of late years by distinguished atheists, which might move a heart of stone, much more should stir the energies of every Christian teacher—himself at peace—to seek by any sacrifice of his own ease or settled preconceptions an "cirenicon," a method of conciliation, an opening for a mutual confession of needless estrangement and provocation.

Does that new philosophy of history which destroys the Christian philosophy of it afford an adequate basis for such a reconstruction of the ideal as is required? Candidly we must reply, "Not yet.". . . Very far are we from being the first who have experienced the agony of discovered delusion. . . . Well may despair almost seize on one who has been, not in name only, but in very truth, a Christian, when that incarnation which had given him in Christ an ever-living brother and friend is found to be but an old myth [of Osiris] with a new life in it.

The most serious trial through which society can pass is encountered in the exuviation of its religious restraints.

Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, ingulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and atheism overwhelming is upon us. . . . Man has become, in a new sense, the measure of the universe; and in this, the latest and most appalling of his soundings, indications are returned from the infinite voids of space and time that his intelligence, with all its noble capacities for love and adoration, is yet alone—destitute of kith or kin in all this universe of being. . . . Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substitute for the waning splendor of "the old," I am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness. And when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine and the lonely