everlasting process, in which we can never be sure that we have definitely attained to the truth. The end of this, of course, is to make all opinions uncertain. We may know what we like best, or what the tendencies of society incline it and us to believe; but we can never, as to religious opinions, know what is objectively true. {94} It is not very difficult to discover what is the nature of this process which is called rationalism. In former times the religious spirit predominated over the secular; but from a variety of causes, and in particular on account of the immense development of secular science since the time of Bacon and Descartes, the secular scientific spirit has since predominated over the religious. And rationalism is merely one of the results of this predominance; a consequence of the application to religious subjects of secular habits of thought. This may manifest itself, now in one way, now in another; in the denial now of transubstantiation, now of the doctrine of the Trinity; but its root and origin is the same: it tends (and this quite takes the romance out of it) to the elimination of the religious ideas, and it is strengthened by whatever strengthens what we have called the secular scientific, or weakens the religious, spirit. Hence that dislike of authority and that over-clouding of the moral character of religious truth; hence that distaste for the miraculous and the mysterious, and that tendency to put into the background, and even to deny, the doctrine of grace; and if the internal wants of those who have just "escaped from the wilderness of Christianity, and still have some of the thorns and brambles sticking to their clothes," make it necessary that something should be substituted for that which is being taken away--a baseless and often unreal sentimentalism is substituted for honest religious duty and earnest devotion. It is only too much to be feared that the world will educate itself out of this also; and that, in the case of those who refuse submission to the Catholic Church, the secular spirit will more and more grow toward its full ascendancy, and therefore toward a total extinction of the already weakened religious ideas. ------- Original. A DREAM.