It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still disturbing. Fulness of bread in the past has been accompanied with leanness of soul. And the modern prophet is still undecided whether this enormous increase of life’s comforts and material satisfactions has revealed an equal and parallel advance in courage and compassion and kindly understandings. The nations, equipped with ever more complicated instruments of warfare, face each other as armed camps across frontiers mined and tortured with the apparatus of destruction. A scared wealthy and middle class confronts a cosmopolitan uprising of the “proletariat,” whose discontent it can neither appease nor forget. The industrious populations which have been swept into masses and congestions by the new industry has not yet found an existence serene, and intelligible, and human. No one, to-day, looking out upon a disturbed and sullen Europe, a disturbed and confident America, but is conscious of a world in motion: whither, no man knows. “The people of our Christian world,” so runs the cry of the first of living prophets--“the people of our Christian world live like animals, guided in their lives merely by personal interests and by their struggle with one another: differing from animals only in that the animals, from time immemorial, have kept the same stomachs, claws, and fangs, while people move with ever-increasing rapidity from roads to railroads, from horses to steam, from spoken sermons and letters to printing, to telegraphs and telephones, and from sailing boats to ocean steamers, from swords to gunpowder, cannons, quick-firing guns, bombs, and war aeroplanes. And life, with telegraphs, telephones, electricity, bombs, and aeroplanes, and with hatred of all for all: directed, not by some uniting spiritual principle, but, on the contrary, by animal instincts which divide, and which employ mental powers for their own satisfaction, becomes even more and more insane and wretched.”[18] What mechanical invention, what mechanical skill, have any promise to offer of immediate and large improvement? Will the cunning ingenuity of men, which embarked on the path of scientific exploration with such large hopes of service to humanity as well as attainment of truth, be able, even at this last, through the multiplication of machinery to eliminate poverty, through the development of the arts of healing to eliminate pain? Or if this be unattainable and delusive, can we find through these and other progressive agencies a permanent healing for the sick soul of humanity? Is the twentieth century to advocate a scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for the apparatus of material pleasure?