conclusions are in direct conflict with human aspirations; and, instead of revelling in the ruin which they have made, deplore with a tone of sadness the impossibility of solving the great enigma. It is clear that writers like these offer a wholly different appearance from those of the last century. The deeper appreciation manifested by them of the systems which they disbelieve, and the more delicate learning of which they are able to avail themselves, constitute features formerly lacking in the works of even the most serious-minded deists,(897) and require a difference in the spirit, if not in the mode, in which Christians must seek to refute them. The solution of this remarkable phenomenon is to be found in the universal change which has passed over every department of mental activity in England in the present century. The peculiar feature of it may be described by the word _spirituality_, if that word be used to imply, in contrast to the utilitarian and materialist tendencies of the last century, the consciousness in ourselves, and appreciation in others, of the operation of the human spirit, its rights, its powers, and its effects. This conviction stimulates in one the vivid consciousness of duty and moral earnestness; in another it hallows human labour, and throws a blessedness around the struggles of industry; in another it kindles the inspiration of art, breaking up conventionalities of style, or expresses itself in poetry, in soliloquies on the inner feelings or in meditations on life, as a set of problems to be explained by the heart. Elsewhere it lifts the man of science above the grovelling idea that discoveries must be sought solely for the purpose of utility. Again, transferring its perception of the operation of spirit to the world of nature, it not unfrequently attributes a soul thereto, and induces a subtle pantheism. Sometimes too by a singular reaction it has a tendency, by the moral earnestness which it stimulates, to depress intellectual speculation, and to wear the appearance of fostering the utilitarianism which it combats. Such is the central principle which characterises our literature, and which, through the diffusion of reading, has moulded the public judgment, and, operating in every department of educated thought, has even altered the form in which unbelief expresses itself. Probably the successive steps of the growth of this subjective tendency in literature might admit of easy statement. The meditative school of poetry, which flourished early in the century(898) among a few refined minds at the English lakes; which loved to ponder mystically on nature or on the spiritual world, or to catch the thought excited in the mind by nature, and follow the series of thoughts which the law of mental association suggested,(899) was one means of creating a subjective and spiritual taste among the youth of the generation which succeeded.