There are here some indications of that strong reaction of the present century towards ancient forms of church life. This reaction seems to me a further consequence of that admiration of power of which I have spoken. For, finding the progress of discovery in the laws of nature constantly bring an assurance most satisfactory to the intellect, men began to demand a similar assurance in other matters; and whatever department of human thought could not be subjected to experiment or did not admit of logical proof began to be regarded with suspicion. The highest realms of human thought--where indeed only grand conviction, and that the result not of research, but of obedience to the voice within, can be had--came to be by such regarded as regions where, no scientific assurance being procurable, it was only to his loss that a man should go wandering: the whole affair was unworthy of him. And if there be no guide of humanity but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its operations,--that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,--then these men are right. But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could not thus be satisfied--men who had in their souls a hunger which the neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology, without the primal law of _their_ many dim-dawning wonders--that is, the Being, if such there might be, who thought their laws first and then embodied them in a world of aeonian growth. These indeed seek law likewise, but a perfect law--a law they can believe perfect beyond the comprehension of powers of whose imperfection they are too painfully conscious. They feel in their highest moments a helplessness that drives them to search after some Power with a heart deeper than his power, who cares for the troubled creatures he has made. But still under the influence of that faithless hunger for intellectual certainty, they look about and divide into two parties: both would gladly receive the reported revelation in Jesus, the one if they could have evidence enough from without, the other if they could only get rid of the difficulties it raises within. I am aware that I distinguish in the mass, and that both sides would be found more or less influenced by the same difficulties--but _more_ and _less_, and therefore thus classified by the driving predominance. Those of the one party, then, finding no proof to be had but that in testimony, and anxious to have all they can--delighting too in a certain holy wilfulness of intellectual self-immolation, accept the testimony in the mass, and become Roman Catholics. Nor is it difficult to see how they then find rest. It is not the dogma, but the contact with Christ the truth, with Christ the man, which the dogma, in pacifying the troubles of the intellect--if only by a