Are we to hope that such an advance in ideas will take place in our own day? We have perhaps advanced beyond the stage when men regard genius as distinctly heaven-born, and the direct gift of the gods, apart from any natural conditions. If it is indeed heaven-born, it is now conceded to be such through the combination of natural causes. But, on the other hand, our best and most refined people will recoil with deep aversion from making a scientific analysis of such conditions; they will exclaim that the possible advantages are as nothing compared with the desecration of that mystery which has been hallowed by the sacraments of the Church, and protected from profane inquiry by a cloud of delicate sentiment. To reduce the holy estate of marriage to the deliberate and scientific production of conditioned offspring will destroy, say they, all the sanctity of the relation, and with it the purity and dignity of our homes. These weighty and respectable objections are to be met by observing that it would be idle and wrong to attempt any reform in opposition to the unanimous sentiment of the very people who alone could carry it out--our most sober and refined classes. Until this sentiment can be gradually changed by argument, and come to be looked on as a venerable and amiable superstition, nothing will be accomplished. But it is a matter of history that the most respectable and hallowed sentiments, if irrational, can be gradually removed by a progress in what Mr. Lecky calls _rationalism_, or intellectual enlightenment. We can even now point to the important fact, that in those countries and those ages where marriages had been confessedly arranged from prudential reasons, they have not been less sacred, nor has home life been less pure, than where vague and irrational sentiments have been brought into the foreground. The lower-class Irish are as faithful and happy in their homes, and the marriage-tie is a sacred and honored as it is anywhere in the world; and yet among them a love-match is rare. It is a matter of cows and of pigs, of the succession to a farm--nay, often of arrangement by the landlord for reasons of his own; and yet these marriages are as happy and as pure as if they had been the outcome of a great mutual passion. The same thing may be said of married life in the country parts of France, where a thrifty and provident race accommodate their unions to their circumstances, and leave the extravagances of great passion to poets and Parisians.