Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast, because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth--the star of trust and hope which "Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines, and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the Addisonian Cato: "But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds." VII THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION