A good many people contemplate the future of the world with an alarmed feeling that vast material progress and enlarged knowledge of the visible and tangible universe are likely to be accompanied by intellectual developments dangerous to the religious spirit in mankind. But to consider thus is to overlook the manifest trend of human thought at the present time. Of the two influences named, material progress and enlarged information about the universe, the former is probably much more directly liable to affect religious feeling adversely than the latter. Epochs of high civilisation and great luxury have often accompanied a general tendency to scepticism, and these conditions are also perhaps (and for the same reasons) not highly favourable to the highest developments of poetry. There have been periods of scientific discovery which have coincided with the spread of irreligion. During the second half of the nineteenth century there was, for instance, no doubt a great increase of popular scepticism arising out of popular deductions (or supposed deductions) from science. Religion unquestionably lost ground in the sense that dogmatic irreligion became rather fashionable. When the people began to learn that geological research had entirely upset the Biblical chronology, and that biological research had proved the development of animal life by evolutionary processes not compatible with a literal acceptance of the account of the creation in Genesis; when knowledge of the developments of language proved that the various tongues of mankind could not possibly have been the subject of a sudden, cataclysmal "confusion" at Babel or elsewhere, and when it became common knowledge that the sun and stars were not suddenly produced for the convenience of man, but were, on the contrary, for the most part much older, as suns and stars, than the earth itself; it is not surprising that minds untrained in philosophical deduction leaped towards atheism, although, of course, none of these discoveries has any more to do with religion, as religion, than, say, chemistry has to do with music. Unless one takes a highly anthropomorphic view of the subject they are not even inimical to revelation. Of course it is open to anyone who chooses, to say that if the statements in the Bible, said to be inspired, are incorrect, the Creator (and Inspirer) either did not know how He had done His work, or told untruths about it; and consequently that scientific discovery has disproved revelation. But that is what I have called a highly anthropomorphic argument, and it may safely be left to the apologists to demolish. Assuredly it is not a sort of argument likely to be met with in the cultured and logical future. But it was an argument which commended itself very widely to the uncultured and illogical past, and great efforts were made to deal with it. These efforts were really inimical to religious faith. Religion having been declared to rest upon the irrefragable