By degrees, too, the philosophical untenableness of materialism began to be popularised, and although it is a great deal easier to accept (or decline) scientific discoveries without understanding the evidence for or against them than to grasp such abstract considerations as the subjectivity of phenomena, popular scepticism began to be directed into new channels. If we could only know phenomena we really know nothing; and it was just as likely that the most absurd myths of the hagiologist might be true as that they might be false--since one could know nothing. Towards the end of the century there is no doubt that among the masses of the people the incomprehensibleness of things in general had the effect of popularising a certain tolerance of Christianity among the class which, a little earlier, had been repudiating it altogether; and if church-going, Sabbath-keeping and other formal acts of religion continued to be mentioned by the clergy and their adherents as the subject of lamentable negligence, the habits thus deplored arose, less and less from conviction and more and more from taste. People stayed away from church not because they rejected Christianity but because church-going bored them. If the clergy saw their congregations dwindle they had themselves to thank for it. The atrocious dulness of nearly all sermons drove away more churchmen than were lured from their pews by militant irreligion. There is not the smallest reason to believe that "free thought" propaganda had any really important part in producing the indifference denounced by the churches. The simple fact is that a growing appetite for amusements, athletic and other, and an intolerance of the boredom inflicted by preachers too indolent or too imperfectly educated to make their discourses tolerable by an active mind, robbed the churches of their visitors. A good preacher never lacked a crowded congregation even in the middle of a week-day in the city of London; nor are such congregations lacking now.