distinctive character; it leads to a definite organisation of mankind and offers powerful opposition to all dissipation, all merely individual caprice. It comes to the individual as a supreme power which brings to him salvation and truth, shapes him for the highest ends, and connects his thought and feeling with an invisible world. With such an undertaking Christianity has exercised most deep-reaching influences on the course of history; in the first place it implanted a new vitality in an exhausted humanity; then in the Middle Ages it worked to the education of a new race; and now that it has become mature it has not ceased to exercise strong, though quieter, influences: considering all the facts, it appears to be the most powerful force in history. But all the greatness of past achievement could not prevent a strong movement from arising in the Modern Age against Christianity; a movement which still continues to increase in power and which undermines the position of Christianity, where outwardly it still appears quite secure. It is true that there never was a period when it was not opposed by individuals, but through the lack of any spiritual import these isolated oppositions had never combined so as to produce a united effect. An effect of this kind was first produced with the emergence of new systems of thought and new streams of life since the beginning of the seventeenth century; as long, however, as this movement was limited to the cultured classes and left the masses untouched, that which existed in it as a menace did not produce its full effect. It was the conviction of Bayle, that the spirit of the Enlightenment would never permeate the masses. In the nineteenth century this "unexpected" happened, and the nature of spiritual endeavour and the disposition of men join together in an assault upon Christianity; an assault which no one with insight will call anything but dangerous. The thing most evident and most talked of is the subversion of the old conception of the world; a conception which is usually associated with Christianity. This conception is less and less able to assert itself in face of the triumphant onward march of modern science. The representation of nature, like that of human history, has been broadened immeasurably and at the same time has acquired inner unity, law, and order; a direct intervention of a supernatural power is felt more and more to be an intolerable derangement. The earth, hitherto the centre of the whole and the chief platform upon which the destiny of the universe was decided, sinks to a position of more correct proportion, and man is much more closely linked to nature and fitted into a common order. How then can that which takes place in him decide what shall be the destiny of the whole?