[Sidenote: Decline of power in parliamentary eloquence.] What I have said respecting the influence of the press upon religious life applies substantially to civil life also. Oratory has sunk into a secondary position, being every day more and more thoroughly supplanted by journalism. No matter how excellent it may be in its sphere of action, it is essentially limited, and altogether incompetent to the influencing of masses of men in the manner which our modern social system requires. Without a newspaper, what would be the worth of the most eloquent parliamentary attempts? It is that which really makes them instruments of power, and gives to them political force, which takes them out of a little circle of cultivated auditors, and throws them broadcast over nations. [Sidenote: Dawn of the Reformation.] Such was the literary condition of Western Europe, such the new power that had been found in the press. These were but initiatory to the great drama now commencing. We have already seen that synchronously with this intellectual there was a moral impulse coming into play. The two were in harmony. At the time now occupying our attention there was a possibility for the moral impulse to act under several different forms. The special mode in which it came into effect was determined by the pecuniary necessities of Italy. It very soon, however, assumed larger proportions, and became what is known to us as the Reformation. The movement against Rome that had been abandoned for a century was now recommenced. [Sidenote: Variation of human thought.] The variation of human thought proceeds in a continuous manner, new ideas springing out of old ones either as corrections or developments, but never spontaneously originating. With them, as with organic forms, each requires a germ, a seed. The intellectual phase of humanity observed at any moment is therefore an embodiment of many different things. It is connected with the past, is in unison with the present, and contains the embryo of the future. Human opinions must hence, of absolute necessity, undergo transformation. What has been received by one generation as undoubted, to a subsequent one becomes so conspicuously fallacious as to excite the wonder of those who do not distinctly appreciate the law of psychical advance that it could ever have been received as true. These phases of transformation are not only related in a chronological way, so as to be obvious when we examine the ideas of society at epochs of a few years or of centuries apart--they exist also contemporaneously in different nations or in different social grades of the same nation, according as the class of persons considered has made a greater or less intellectual progress.