Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth, and the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than ever a sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more than ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking generally, the past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately to observe and study the phenomena of change. We call that time, which is still our own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The Middle Ages, despite the obscurantism of the Church, had far better claim to that title. One needs but to turn the pages of the doctors, even before the day of Abelard who is supposed first to have been the champion of reason against authority, to see how profound was their conviction that in reason might be discovered a justification of the faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the champion of reason because only with him do men begin to perceive the inability of reason to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of observation, for never before have men given themselves with such complete abandon to observing and recording systematically. By long and intent observation of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a seeming order in disorder, the shifting visions of time have assumed a specious regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a home on this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage. For life is but a dream whose shapes return, Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day, some night and day: we learn, The while all change and many vanish quite, In their recurrence with recurrent changes A certain seeming order; where this ranges We count things real; such is memory's might.