plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert, “and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome. Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till 1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,” and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive. Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness, sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background” has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a