is not the sensational fact of a fashion or a period, but a verity of the human heart, which may foretell, but can never be affected by, anything which that heart may conceive. In other words, Hawthorne belonged neither to this nor to any other generation of writers further than that his productions may be used as a test of the inner veracity of all the rest. But of late years a new order of things has been coming into vogue, and the new novelists have been among the first to reflect it; and of these the Americans have shown themselves among the most susceptible. Science, or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact, and to let all the rest--if rest there be--go. From this point of view, God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally disproved,--because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final, be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate outside the domain of logic,--but as being a hopelessly vague and untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation of personal existence; life is--the predicament of the body previous to death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number; civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself to be regarded as a rampant and dogmatic atheist; he is simply the modest and humble doubter of what he cannot prove. He even recognizes the persistence of the religious instinct in man, and caters to it by a new religion suited to the times--the Religion of Humanity. Thus he is secure at all points: for if the religion of the Bible turn out to be true, his disappointment will be an agreeable one; and if it turns out false, he will not be disappointed at all. He is an agnostic--a person bound to be complacent whatever happens. He may indulge a gentle regret, a musing sadness, a smiling pensiveness; but he will never refuse a comfortable dinner, and always wear something soft next his skin, nor can he altogether avoid the consciousness of his intellectual superiority.