Still, when all allowance for other influence has been made; and all the ill done in its name admitted to the full; Christianity remains, the only power which has regenerated personal life, and that beyond the circle even of its professed adherents, the light of it far outshining the lamp which has held its flame. And personal life is after all the battle-ground, on which the progress of the race must be decided. Nor ever indeed should this be more apparent than in the present day. For materialism, that old enemy alike of the Christian and the human cause, has passed from the study to the street. No one indeed may regret this more than the high-souled scientific thinker, whose life belies the inevitable consequences of his creed. But the ruthless logic of human passion is drawing those consequences fiercely; and the luxury of the rich, and the communistic cry of the poor, and the desecration of marriage, and the disintegration of society, and selfishness in policy, and earthliness in art, are plausibly pleading science in their favour. And with all this Christianity claims, as of old, to cope, because it is the religion of the Incarnation. For the real strength of materialism lies in the justice which it does to the material side of nature--the loveliness of earth and sea and sky and sun and star; the wonder of the mechanism which controls alike the rushing comet and the falling leaf; the human body crowning both, at once earth's fairest flower and most marvellous machine. And Christianity is the only religion which does equal justice to this truth, while precluding its illegitimate perversion. It includes the truth, by the essential importance which it assigns to the human body, and therefore to the whole material order, with which that body is so intimately one; while it excludes its perversion, by shewing the cause of that importance to lie in its connection, communion, union with the spirit, and consequent capacity for endless degrees of glory.