There has never been any reformation as yet without dogma and supernaturalism. Ordinary people acknowledge no real reasons for virtue except heaven and hell-fire. When heaven and hell-fire cease to persuade, custom for a while is partly efficacious, but its strength soon decays. Some good men, knowing the uselessness of rational means to convert or to sustain their fellows, have clung to dogma with hysterical energy, but without any genuine faith in it. They have failed, for dogma cannot be successful unless it be the _inevitable_ expression of the inward conviction. The voices now are so many and so contradictory that it is impossible to hear any one of them distinctly, no matter what its claim on our attention may be. The newspaper, the circulating library, the free library, and the magazine are doing their best to prevent unity of direction and the din and confusion of tongues beget a doubt whether literature and the printing press have actually been such a blessing to the race as enlightenment universally proclaims them to be. The great currents of human destiny seem more than ever to move by forces which tend to no particular point. There is a drift, tremendous and overpowering, due to nobody in particular, but to hundreds of millions of small impulses. Achilles is dead, and the turn of the Myrmidons has come. “Myrmdons, race féconde Myrmidons, Enfin nous commandons: Jupiter livre le monde Aux Myrmidons, aux Myrmidons. Voyant qu’ Achille succombe, Ses Myrmidons, hors des rangs, Disent: Dansons sur sa tombe Ses petits vont être grands.” My last defence is that the Universe is an organic unity, and so subtle and far-reaching are the invisible threads which pass from one part of it to another that it is impossible to limit the effect which even an insignificant life may have. “Were a single dust-atom destroyed, the universe would collapse.” “ . . . who of men can tell That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet If human souls did never kiss and greet?” BELIEF, UNBELIEF, AND SUPERSTITION