anxiety of hoping, enquiring, and searching, though we are bound to add, mistaken men. In the other case, though it may seem to many rash to say one word to mitigate the severity of the judgment that both is and ever will be passed on such a system as Positivism, yet, even here, let us be just and sympathising. There is, no doubt, in Positivism much that is plainly repulsive, and really calls for severity; still, even in this system, we may trace the prevailing desire to find something solid, something which appears to be proof to the changes of opinion or the fluctuation of creeds. So the attempt is made to secure a scientific basis, and to place thereon fact after fact, when each has become verified and established, and so to build onward--we cannot honestly say upward--until something like a system is so far constructed that succeeding generations may feel induced to continue it. So even in this sombre and cheerless system there is, we believe, really at work a desire to touch ground. To that desire, however, it must be sorrowfully added, every loftier aspiration, every nobler incentive, is necessarily sacrificed. Science and scientific truth is used in a way that warrants the apprehension that--if such is to be the use made of it--the progress of science may tend, first, to impair, and, next, to obliterate, the sense of _responsibility_ on which the present and the future alike so solemnly rest. It is not without reason, then, that this is dwelt gravely upon by all sober thinkers; nor is it too much to say that this is now one of the gravest considerations connected with the advance of modern scientific investigations. The tendencies of such investigations certainly do _appear_ to hinder the due recognition of these two momentous principles--first, the sense of responsibility; and, secondly, the sense of dependence on something higher than law, order, and evolution. This hindrance, we trust, is only in appearance; still that appearance is accepted by many as reality, and it is not without reason that we are again and again reminded that the acceptance of the truth of the Christian creed will with many depend on its power of assimilating the doctrine of universal causation, or, to speak more precisely, of demonstrating that that doctrine is itself only a form of a yet higher and holier truth.