Religion is hidden by many a strange garment, but its heart is the same, and built firmly into the human structure. The old mystic spoke truly when he defined God as an unutterable sigh. Now and again we must draw a deep breath of relief--and that is religion. That no intellectual belief or opinion is necessarily bound up with religion, it is nowadays unnecessary to show. To how many has Schopenhauer--an indifferent philosopher, but a great master of the secrets of religion--brought from afar, into the light of the modern world, the mysteries of the soul that seeks for consolation? A weary and distracted creature, at war even with himself, he was of those for whom the Kingdom of Heaven is especially made; he sought and found, and moulded into the sweet harmonics of his prose, the things that make for rest and for consolation--and who is not sometimes weary and distracted, and in need of rest? We English, it is true, are not an aboriginally religious people; we are great in practical life, and we are marvellous poets; but while we have an immense appetite for imported religion, we have never ourselves even produced one of those manuals of piety which, since the days of Lâo-tsze, have become the common possession of the devout everywhere. One little Encheiridion alone there is, so far as I know, in which, during recent years, an English writer has brought echoes of old times, of exhilaration or of peace, into forms which enable the children of to-day to be at one with those of former days. “Quid nobis cum generibus et speciebus?” asked the author of the “Imitation.” Hugo de St. Victor was driven to religion by the barrenness of dialectics: “Truth cannot be discovered by ratiocination,” he said; “it is by what he is that man finds truth.” To-day, Edward Carpenter escapes from the burden of science to find joy for awhile in the perennial fountain which springs up within, and which the measuring-rod of science has never meted. “Towards Democracy” has a quality of its own, which many have tasted with delight, and which will probably give it place with those sources of joy known to few, but well loved of those few.