In contrast with this, let us ask what we think of an eclipse ourselves, and how far any religious emotion, determinant of action or of inaction, is connected with the phenomenon in our experience. We know, in the first place, that eclipses belong to the natural order, and we do not feel either grateful to the supernatural powers, or ungrateful, with regard to them. Even the idea that eclipses demonstrate the power of God is hardly likely to occur to us, for we constantly see terrestrial objects eclipsed by cast shadows; and the mere falling of a shadow is to us only the natural interruption of light by the intervention of any opaque object. In the true theory of eclipses there is absolutely no ground whatever for religious emotion, and accordingly the phenomenon is now entirely disconnected from religious ideas. The consequence is that where the Athenian general had a strong motive for religious emotion, a motive so strong that he sacrificed his army to the supposed will of Heaven, a modern general in the same situation would feel no emotion and make no sacrifice. If this process stopped at eclipses the result would be of little importance, as eclipses of the celestial bodies are not frequently visible, and to lose the opportunity of emotion which they present is not a very sensible loss. But so far is the process from stopping at eclipses, that exactly the same process is going on with regard to thousands of other phenomena which are one by one, yet with increasing rapidity, ceasing to be regarded as special manifestations of Divine will, and beginning to be regarded as a part of that order of nature with which, to quote Professor Huxley's significant language, "nothing interferes." Every one of these transferrences from supernatural government to natural order deprives the religious sentiment of one special cause or motive for its own peculiar kind of emotion, so that we are becoming less and less accustomed to such emotion (as the opportunities for it become less frequent), and more and more accustomed to accept events and phenomena of all kinds as in that order of nature "with which nothing interferes." This single mental conception of the unfailing regularity of nature is doing more in our time to affect the religious condition of thoughtful people than could be effected by many less comprehensive conceptions.