defence is not deficient in energy or vigour, and when English fair play seems to suggest that each side should be allowed to fight it out without having any advantages arising from prepensions or prejudice. However this may be, there is no doubt that the cause we have specified is a real and a prevailing one. Over-hasty scientific generalization is certainly one of the causes of the present state of modern religious belief. One more cause we may also pause to specify, as it involves in it much that will minister comfort and reassurance. This cause is the eager and often impatient search for solid ground whereon religion and morality may be based. With all their faults, men are now certainly seeking for truth. There may be misapplications of historical criticism, there may be misuses and misapprehensions of the real testimony of science, but amid all there is clearly a searching for truth and firm ground. The processes of destructive criticism are in fact nearly over, and the difficult process of reconstruction is commencing. The due remembrance of this will help us in estimating a little more calmly, and perhaps also a little more fairly, some of the startling phenomena presented by the present state of religious belief. Let us, for example, take for a moment into consideration two remarkable characteristics of the present time,--first, the attempts to form a system of morality independent of revealed religion; and, secondly, the acceptance on the part of several earnest and truthful minds of such a system as Positivism. These really would seem to be at first sight two inexplicable phenomena. Both, however, are to be accounted for by that searching for something to rest on, which has just been mentioned. It has been assumed in the one case, far too hastily, that the uncertainties connected with the belief in the facts of revealed religion are so great, that no system of morality could be considered securely founded if it rested only on the Scriptures. It has been felt by many earnest thinkers that any such system, to be a true one, ought to rest solely on principles acknowledged to be of universal application, and on maxims that have received the assent of all the better part of civilized mankind. If the teaching of Scripture be in general harmony with such maxims and principles, its concurrence is not to be slighted; but it is not deemed as of more real moment than the concurrence of any other form of religious teaching that has exercised a real influence over any large portion of the human family. Religion generally is accepted as a buttress to the rising edifice of morality, but as nothing further. The tower is being builded really with the desire to reach heaven: if the sequel be what it was of old, it may still be conceded, with all fairness, that the attempt is not made in a bad spirit To change slightly the allusion, the effort is not made in the spirit of the Titans who piled Pelion on Ossa, but with all the earnestness and