Notoriously, the fashions of religious faith change tardily. Such change is always of the nature of concession. And since the conceptions of the cult are of no material consequence, taken by themselves and in their direct incidence, they are subject, as such, to no direct or deliberate control or correction in behalf of the community’s material interests or its technological requirements. It is almost if not altogether by force of their consonance or dissonance with the prevailing habits of thought inculcated by the routine of life that any given run of religious verities find acceptance, command general adherence to their teaching, or become outworn and are discarded; and such lack of consonance must become very pronounced before a radical change of the kind in question will take effect. Barring conversion to a new faith, it is commonly by insensible shifts of adaptation and reconstruction that any wide-reaching change is worked out in these fundamental conceptions. Such was the character of the move by which the Mediæval cult merged in the modernised theological concepts of a later age. Gradually, by force of unremitting habituation to a new scheme of life, and marked by long-drawn theological polemics, a change passed over the spirit of theological speculation, whereby the fundamentals of the faith were infused with the spirit of the handicraft system, and the preconceptions of workmanship insensibly supplanted those of mastery and subservience in the working concepts of devout Christendom. Meantime, while the routine of the era of handicraft was slowly reconstructing the current conceptions of divinity on lines consonant with the habit of mind of workmanship, the ancient conceptions continued with gradually abating force to assert their prescriptive dominion over men’s habitual thinking. This gradually loosening hold of the ancient conceptions is best seen in the speculations of the philosophers and in the higher generalisations of scientific inquiry in early modern times.