partly a result of this, a new sense has sprung up in him--an intense self-consciousness as to his own position; and his entire view of himself is undergoing a vague change: whilst the positive basis on which knowledge has been placed, has given it a constant and coercive force, and has made the same change common to the whole civilised world. Thought and feeling amongst the western nations are conforming to a single pattern: they are losing their old chivalrous character, their possibilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure. They are settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out beforehand. Such is the condition of the western world; and the western world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the east. Thus opinions that the present age is forming for itself have a weight and a volume that opinions never before possessed. They are the first beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion--an oecumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position. The great question is, what shape finally will this dawning self-consciousness take? Will it contain in it that negation of the supernatural which our positive assertions are at present supposed to necessitate? If so, then it is not possible to conceive that this last development of humanity, this stupendous break from the past which is being accomplished by our understanding of it, will not be the sort of break which takes place when a man awakes from a dream, and finds all that he most prized vanished from him. It is impossible to conceive that this awakening, this discovery by man of himself, will not be the beginning of his decadence; that it will not be the discovery on his part that he is a lesser and a lower thing than he thought he was, and that his condition will not sink till it tallies with his own opinion of it.