enter into a struggle where the ground continually changes, and where victory at the best is only partial, and but leads to further contest. It is well to remember, also, that in the intellectual arena to attack is easier than to defend, and any shallow, incoherent talker or writer can propose difficulties which the keenest thinker will find great trouble to explain. Since we and our works fall to ruin and pass away, we seem instinctively to take the side of those who seek to undermine and overthrow systems of thought and belief which claim to be indestructible, and the human heart is half a traitor to the Church which declares that she is indefectible and infallible. Is there not indeed, however we account for it, in all nature a kind of dread and horror of the supernatural, such as one who hides within his bosom a secret of dark guilt feels in the presence of the conscience of mankind? And does not this make the world lean to the side of those who would eliminate God from nature? And yet, since man's heart is the home of contradictions, is it not also true to say that he is naturally religious? His faith in God is as deep and unwavering as his faith in the testimony of the senses; and if there are atheists there are also men who hold that all things are unreal and only appear to be; that the world is but a myriad-formed, a myriad-tinted idea, the dream of a substanceless dreamer. Not only do we believe in God and in the soul, but all that we love, all that we hope for, all that gives to life charm, dignity, and sacredness, is interpenetrated, perfumed, and illumined by this faith. If men could be persuaded that the unconscious is the beginning and the end of all things, what good would have been gained? The light of heaven would fade away, and the soul's high faith be made a lie; the poor would have no friend, and the rich no heart; the wicked would be without fear, and the good without hope; success would be consecrated, and death alone would remain as the refuge of the unfortunate. Even animal indulgence, in sinking out of the moral order, would lose its human charm. If then in our day there is wide-spread scepticism, a sort of vague feeling that science is undermining religion and that the most sacred beliefs are dissolving, the cause of this lies not so much in the natural tendencies of the mind and heart, as in social conditions, in passing phases of thought, in the shifting of the point of view from which men have hitherto been accustomed to look on nature; and the continuance and the progress of doubt, and consequently of indifference, is, to some extent at least, to be ascribed also to the fact that the most earnest believers in God and in Christianity have, for now more than a century, been less eager to acquire the best philosophic and literary cultivation of mind than others who, having lost faith in the supernatural, seek for compensation in a wider and deeper knowledge of