I do not know that this spirit of irreligion and unbelief has made much inroad on the churches. It is as yet simply eating away the material upon which the churches must recruit and perpetuate themselves. There is a large body of men and women, the bulk probably of our population, that is between the church and its enemies; not members of the church or open professors of religion, they have yet had reverence for the religious beliefs, have respected the rule of conscience, and believed in the existence of one Supreme Being. These men and women have been useful to the cause of religion, in that they held all the outposts about the camp of the church militant, and protected it with enwrapping conservatism and sympathy. It is this class of people that are now yielding to the assaults of the infidel. Having none of the inspiration of religion, and possessing neither the enthusiasm of converts nor the faith of veterans, they are easily bewildered and overcome. It is a careless and unthinking multitude on which the atheists are working, and the very inertia of a mob will carry thousands if the drift of the mass once floats to the ocean. And the man or woman who rides on the ebbing tide goes never to return. Religious beliefs once shattered are hardly mended. The church may reclaim its sinners, but its skeptics, never. It is not surprising that this period of critical investigation into all creeds and beliefs has come. It is a logical epoch, come in its appointed time. It is one of the penalties of progress. We have stripped all the earth of mystery, and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitched its crucible for an analysis of the soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine—a vastness and vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret; felt its most secret pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed it and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstrated; what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth, and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself, and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders as the shores of a star that lights the space beyond our vision are to us to-day; the Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the