society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists at all--of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful--that future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore to-day for the appeal--to the general--of the revivalist preacher, with which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no terrors.” And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding. Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties, they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day. “The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation, “seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,”