The present time is an era when intellectual persons are ashamed of being credulous. It is the perfectly natural and desirable result of the working of the scientific spirit. Everything is relentlessly investigated, the enormous structure of natural law is being discovered to underlie all the most surprising, delicate, and apparently fortuitous processes, and no one can venture to forecast where the systematisation will end. The result is a great inrush of bracing and invigorating candour. It is not that our liberty of reflection and action is increased. It is rather increasingly limited. But at least we are growing to discern where our boundaries are, and it is deeply refreshing to find that the boundaries erected by humanity are much closer and more cramping than the boundaries determined by God. We are no longer bound by human authority, by subjective theories, by petty tradition. We are no longer required to tremble before thaumaturgy and conjuring and occultism. It is true that science has hitherto confined itself mainly to the investigation of concrete phenomena; but the same process is sure to be applied to metaphysics, to sociology, to psychology; and the day will assuredly come when the human race will analyse the laws which govern progress, which regulate the exact development of religion and morality. The demolition of credulity is, as I have said, a wholly desirable and beneficial thing. Most intelligent people have found some happiness in learning that the dealings of God--that is, the creative and originative power behind the universe--are at all events not whimsical, however unintelligible they may be. No one at all events is now required to reconcile with his religious faith a detailed belief in the Mosaic cosmogony, or to accept the fact that a Hebrew prophet was enabled to summon bears from a wood to tear to pieces some unhappy boys who found food for mirth in his personal appearance. That is a pure gain. But side by side with this entirely wholesome process, there are a good many people who have thrown overboard, together with their credulity, a quality of a far higher and nobler kind, which may be called faith. Men who have seen many mysteries explained, and many dark riddles solved in nature, have fallen into what is called materialism, from the mistaken idea that the explanation of material phenomena will hold good for the discernment of abstract phenomena. Yet any one who approaches the results of scientific investigation in a philosophical and a poetical spirit, sees clearly enough that nothing has been attempted but analysis, and that the mystery which surrounds us is only thrust a little further off, while the darkness is as impenetrable and profound as ever. All that we have learnt is how natural law works; we have not come near to learning why it works as it does. All we have really acquired is a knowledge that the audacious and unsatisfactory theories,