Let us begin with the conventional standard, and examine piety by its manifestation in the ecclesiastical forms. Here is a difficulty at the outset, in determining upon the measure, for there is no one and general ecclesiastical standard, common to all parties of Christians, from the Catholic to the Quaker; each measures by its own standard, but denies the correctness of all the others. It is as if a foot were declared the unit of long measure, and then the actual foot of the chief justice of a State, were taken as the rule by which to correct all measurements; then the foot would vary as you went from North Carolina to South, and, in any one State, would vary with the health of the judge. However, to do what can be done with a measure thus uncertain, it is plain, that, estimated by any ecclesiastical standard, the amount of piety is small. There is, as men often say, "A general decline of piety;" that is a common complaint, recorded and registered. But what makes the matter worse to the ecclesiastical philosopher, and more appalling to the complainers, is this: it is a decline of long standing. The disease which is thus lamented is said to be acute, but is proved to be chronic also; only it would seem, from the lamentations of some modern Jeremiahs, that the decline went on with accelerated velocity, and, the more chronic the disease was, the acuter it also became. Tried by this standard, things seem discouraging. To get a clearer view, let us look a little beyond our own borders, at first, and then come nearer home. The Catholic church complains of a general defection. The majority of the Christian church confesses that the Protestant Reformation was not a revival of religion, not a "Great awakening," but a great falling to sleep; the faith of Luther and Calvin was a great decline of religion--a decline of piety in the ecclesiastical form; that modern philosophy, the physics of Galileo and Newton, the metaphysics of Descartes and of Kant, mark another decline of religion--a decline of piety in the philosophical form; that all the modern democracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marks a yet further decline of religion--a decline of piety in the political form; that all the modern secular societies, for removing the evils of men and their sins, mark a yet fourth decline of religion--a decline of piety in the philanthropic form. Certainly, when measured by the mediæval standard of Catholicism, these mark four great declensions of piety, for, in all four, the old principle of subordination to an external and personal authority is set aside.