gradually leavening with free ideas which sooner or later must tend to efface sects in religion like parties in politics. The process has by no means gone so far in the one case as in the other. There is still a great conservative religious partya party with two vast separate aggregations, the High Church and the Evangelical; but it would seem as if neither of these stood as high as they did some years ago. They are formed of men, few of whom hold a prominent place in the intellectual life of the time, and none of whom hold out the promise of hereafter rising to higher influence. The younger generation we might almost compare to the sands pouring down the sides of the loose hillocks on the shore and swelling the ever-growing mass of Broad opinion below. Young England' now is assuredly not Puseyite, still less is it Calvinist. A small portion of it only belongs to the earlier Broad Church of Maurice and Kingsley. The far profounder school, of which the Oxford Regius Professor of Greek is the head, probably numIbers at this moment more of the rising intellect of the time-the intellect which shortly must take the foremost place in politics and literature-than any other in the land. The literature of the time bears unmistakeable traces of this crumbling away of definite traditional belief, this levelling process going on in the opinions of all the most active and cultivated minds. Few of the peculiar and distinctive doctrines of the older creeds, whose influence might be traced in every line of the literature of earlier times, seem to have a place in the history, the science, the fiction, or the higher periodical writings of our day. A Moslem or Hindu, coming to England and studying our journals and our book-shelves, would find it a Christian literature in the sense only of a wide humanity, of a reverent and somewhat distant tone in all mention of the Divine Being, and of a peculiar modern mode of paying a warm, brief homage to the name of Christ, resembling the selfcrossing of a well-feeling Romanist at the sight of a crucifix. Of the

special doctrines, necessary to salvation,' of Athanasius, of Luther, or of Calvin, of any recognition of either Church or Bible as a final court of appeal for metaphysics, morals, history, or physical science, he would find scarcely any trace at all. A book or a periodical which assumes the orthodox doctrines, and applies them to the real facts of life, is thereby immediately marked as belonging to the 'religious world,' and passes out of the sphere of regular literature. Thus the members of the republic of letters, at all events, must needs be classed as holding in religion the same position which thinking men generally at present hold in politics. They are Liberals, but not extreme Radicals. They desire reform, not revolution; and their tone towards the past is tender rather than inimical.

In so

far then as literature must be held to be the vane on our spire, we must judge thereby which way the wind is blowing all around.

There is much of good, and somewhat of evil, in this religious attitude of our generation. It is good

inasmuch as it is an attitude of reverence. Whatever Englishmen believe or disbelieve now, there is hardly a trace of Voltairian shallow and trivial contempt, or of the solemn sneer of that lord of irony,' Gibbon; neither are we indifferent to the whole subject, in the deplorable manner of clever Frenchmen and Italians. Let an Englishman approach ever so nearly to the dread gulf of atheism, he very seldom denies that he knows it is a gulfterrible and dark, and that he would fain turn round and escape it. The self-conceited satisfaction in verbal quibbles, whereby the shallower races of the South are content to shut out God and Heaven from human eyes, are flimsy veils, rent asunder at once in the strong grasp of the Saxon. Is there, or is there not, a God? Is there, or is there not, a life to come? These are questions, he may perhaps admit with downcast eyes and aching heart, to be for the present beyond his solution; but he will never dismiss them with a shrug, a quibble, and a smile. Huc tells us that when a

Chinese is asked his religion he considers it an imperative duty of courtesy to depreciate it, and praise that of his interlocutor: My religion is the poor, and mean, and foolish religion of Lao-Tze. It is not nearly so good a religion as the high and exalted religion of Fo; but opinions only vary: Truth is one. We are all brothers.' The difference between these Chinese and intelligent men in Southern Europe seems to be that they all equally despise the religions in whose forms they acquiesce, and each professes a stupid and unmeaning latitudinarianism. The Chinese alone speaks civilly of another's faith, while the Frenchman and the Italian insults both it and his own with absolute impartiality!

English scepticism in our time is mostly of that sort of which it may be said

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

It is honest, serious, and arises in most cases from the sincere interest taken in the subject. Along with it (in whatever degree it may exist) there lives a strong and high moral faith; an intense belief in justice, truth, goodness, purity; higher standards of virtue, higher conceptions of what life ought to be made, nay, even a wholly new spirit of tenderness for any genuine religious feeling in other creeds and agesthese are symptoms full of largest promise. Whatever revolution in opinion may be in store, there can be no reason to fear for its ultimate results, while Scepticism itself assumes such shapes as these.

On the other hand, there is an evil side to the religious attitude of the age. It is the disposition to accept as a finality that condition of hesitation and uncertainty which in the nature of things should be one of transition. There is an unavowed feeling current through the higher minds of the age, that a definite Faith is an unattainable good; that the larger a man's mind, and the broader his grasp of the great facts of life, so much the more cloudy must be his creed, so much the feebler must glimmer for him the ray of Light

Divine whereby Earth's pathways are cheered for humbler souls.' It is not merely that men do not now hope to reduce all the awful mysteries of theology to half a page of formularies. It is not merely that they have ceased to look for celestial manna of infallible doctrines, rained down by Book or Church, for mortals to gather up and be fed. They no longer hope to have any theology at all. They no longer look with filial confidence to the Father of Spirits for that bread of life without which our souls must faint and perish. Here is the real weak point of Faith, properly so called; not the faith in books or churches, but in the ultimate intuitions of human nature; those intuitions which tell us that the Creator cannot leave unsatisfied the greatest want of His noblest creature, while He openeth His hand and fulfilleth the desire of bird and brute;-those intuitions which tell us that all which has glorified and hallowed the past, which has exalted man into the martyr, and purified him into the saint, the religion which has been the source of everything most beautiful and everything most holy, cannot be a dream and a mistake.

There is a great error current in our way of viewing these things just now. Because we have discovered that we cannot attain infallible truth, we have leaped to the conclusion that we can dispense with truth altogether. Because there is no miraculous potable gold in the alchemy of the soul, we imagine we can live without natural food. In youth we plant our tree of faith in hot haste, and dig it up by the roots, and plant again and again equally fruitlessly; and then we sit down in despair, and cross our hands and say, 'We will plant no more. Let the ground lie barren.' But our duty is to plant, to plant deeply and firmly, perchance with much labour and many prayers, and then at last the faith will strike its roots into our hearts and grow and flourish year by year, warmed by the sun and watered by the rains of heaven, till the feeble shoot has become a mighty tree,-different from the shoot, inasmuch as it is larger and

more beautiful, yet in truth the same, and developed from the same firm-set root. Then we ourselves may look back on the day of small things, when a blast of idle words could have overthrown us, and rejoice that neither life, nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,' can separate us from God, or cast our faith uprooted on the ground.

In Morals, as well as in Politics and Religion, the present generation is widely divided from the past. Theoretically it holds different opinions, and, practically, it has established a very different standard of virtue. The system of Paley and Bentham, modified and ennobled in the hands of John Stuart Mill, represents even the Happiness-test theory in a far better light, while, on the other hand, the opposite school of ethics, which sets forth virtue as the end of creation, and intuition as our moral guide, has gained ground so far that it may be said to colour our literature, almost as Paley's doctrines did those of the last generation. In particular, Divines of nearly all varieties of theological opinion have ceased to preach the miserable 'Do good that you may go to heaven' sermons we used to hear, and sound a nobler note as to the motive of duty, even when their ideas concerning the origin of our knowledge of it may be ever so confined. Kingsley's apostrophe in the Saints' Tragedy has struck the key-note of the newer and grander lesson:

Is selfishness-for time a sin— Stretched out into eternity, celestial prudence?

People interest themselves little in theories of morals, and contentedly listen to the most degrading heresies on the subject, while they are ready to call fire and flame over some infinitely small and obscure error of theology. Yet among all the ignorance and indifference on the subject, the progress towards a higher system insensibly produces beneficial practical results. nobler principle echoed about, penetrates men's brains at last, and

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kindles a generous warmth in their hearts, which the meaner one was unable to touch. The duties of the rich towards the poor are assuredly understood in quite a different sense now from what they were formerly, when careless alms or ostentatious Christian benefactions were supposed to fulfil them sufficiently. The whole movement, of which the Social Science Association is the visible type, owes its existence to the higher senses of responsibility, first to seek out and discover, and then to remedy the misery of the pauper and the criminal, the ignorant and the vicious. For one 'Man of Ross,' one Hannah More, or Mrs. Fry, of the last age, there are thousands of philanthropists now devoting themselves almost as a matter of course to doing all that in their power may lie, to lift a little of the weight of the world's burden from the shoulders of the weak and the suffering. No sooner is a scheme of beneficence started than aid flows in from every quarter from unknown friends. A mere summary of the work now doing of this sort in England would fill a volume. Here is surely the Spirit of the Age' in its very noblest development. In many less obvious ways a change has taken place in the general manner of regarding questions of moral importance. Thirty years ago the man who should have spoken of marriages contracted for convenience as essentially immoral, would have been laughed at for his pains. In the upper classes the notion that such marriages were fit and right, that esteem was the only thing needed to render a worldly alliance in every way good and proper, was instilled into the minds of young people as a matter of course. young lady who declined 'advantageous' proposals for the simple reason that she disliked the proposer, was considered to deserve poverty and ridicule for the rest of her life, unless in the rare case of her being in a position to command other similarly advantageous alliances. Even down to the present time, a few belated writers of fiction make their heroines do a noble action in marrying some man they

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abhor, to obey their fathers or oblige their mothers. All this miserable folly is going out of fashion. We are beginning to see that the canon that marriage must hallow love' has a converse quite equally sacred, and that love also must hallow marriage.'

It is needless to point out the often-recognized changes which have occurred in the social morals of the century. Drunkenness, gambling, blasphemy, these three giant vices, at all events, have been extruded in uttermost disgrace from the circles where once they blazed in full effrontery. Perhaps other vices, worse than they, may yet, with God's help, be conquered also.

As to the aesthetics of our age, who knows what they are? Are we Romanticists or Classicists? Is pre-Raphaelitism an accepted thing? Ought our buildings, public and private, to be Gothic, or Greek, or Italian? or something jumbled of all? or something wholly new? Should our furniture be Tudor, or Renaissance, or Louis XIV., or Style Empire? When we ask these questions, we awake to the curious fact, that every preceding generation has had its style more or less marked and predominant, through all the works of the day. But our generation has no such style. There is no one thread of thought or taste running through the multitudinous shapes or colours which our houses within and without display. If a future painter wishes to give 'An Interior, Temp. Q. Victoria,' or a future novelist describe vividly an English house in 1864, what can either of them do in the way of architecture or furniture to give couleur locale to their sketches? The Crinoline remains the sole original feature of the epoch. In manners, where are we? We will not say, like the young midshipman, who was desired by his father to take notes of the manners and customs of the nations whom he visited, and who simply appended to those of the Polynesians 'Manners, none; customs, beastly.' We are not at all 'beastly.' Probably real refinement and delicacy never reached so high a point before, as among the middle and upper

classes of England now. Certainly, we may doubt that cleanliness ever did so. If the conquest of India had only availed to bring us back so many exquisitely clean ladies and gentlemen, and to introduce the supreme institution of the matutinal tub, then would not the empire of Aurengzebe have fallen in vain. Still for 'manners, alas! for mode of address, for conversation, for the minor courtesies of life which make all the difference between jolting down the road of life in a cart, and rolling over it in a well-swung carriage, it can hardly be denied there is a grievous falling off from the days of our fathers. Is this owing to women? A great change has certainly taken place in their position. A woman's lot is a freer, happier thing by far than it was when life's lottery offered her but the one prize of a congenial marriage, and all the rest of her chances were miserable blanks of unhappy wedlock or dreary maidenhood, pinned up in narrowest circles of conventionality. Still further may these changes go. But let us trust that however may hereafter be adjusted many questions opened now, it will never cease to be woman's aim to soften and refine the manners of their time, and to claim from men that gentle courtesy which it is equally a pleasure and an honour to give and to receive. The fear that they should do otherwise seems about as well founded as that they should join in a league for the general massacre of babies, or anything else equally congenial to their natures.

To resume. Nineteenth Century Père was a fine worthy gentleman in thick white cravat and blue coat. He had the narrowest political and religious creed, and the worst æsthetic taste possible. But he was brave (as some fifty well-fought battles by sea and land could testify), pious, and charitable, according to his lights, and of supreme courtesy of manners and chivalry of feeling. He left to his son (with all his foolish opinions) the English constitution and the English church, a variety of hideous edifices and public monuments, and a rather greater tendency