infrequently nowadays foresee and avoid poverty. And finally, in respect even to unavoidable evils, it will occur to no one to rely upon anything but human science and human effort. [Sidenote: Progress in matters of belief since heathen antiquity and the Middle Ages.] Owing to the causes above enumerated, how far we have travelled since the time of the ancients and the Middle Ages! In the first place we no longer lend credence to oracles or to predictions. The law at least no longer goes the length of lending credence to them, and even punishes those who endeavour to speculate upon a naïveté of their more innocent neighbours. Soothsayers at the present day are no longer lodged in Temples. And in no case are philosophers and higher personages among their clients. We are far from the time when Socrates and his disciples made a pilgrimage to consult the oracle, when the gods spoke, and gave advice, and regulated the conduct of men, and took the place of attorneys, of physicians, of judges, and decided upon peace and war. If it had been affirmed to a pagan that the day would come when man would find the oracle at Delphi a superfluity, he would have been as frankly surprised as a Christian is to-day when he hears it affirmed that cathedrals, priests, and religious ceremonies will some day become a superfluity. [Sidenote: Tendency toward simplicity and uniformity.] The rôle which prophecies played in the religion of the Hebrews is well known. In the Middle Ages certain prophecies, such as that of the millennium, were publicly and miserably put to the proof. Since that time dogmatic religion, in the fear of compromising itself, has stood aloof from oracles and prophecies, preferring increase of security to extent of influence. Thus by degrees authoritative religion has come to renounce its sway over one of the most important portions of human life, which it pretended formerly to possess a knowledge of, and to regulate—the future. It contents itself to-day with the present. Its predictions, ever vaguer and more vague, nowadays bear only on the period beyond the grave; it contents itself with promising heaven to the faithful—which the Catholic religion indeed goes the length of in some measure securing for them by absolution. And one may recognize in the confessional a certain substitute for the divination of former times. The hand of the priest opens or shuts the door of heaven for the believer kneeling in the shadow of the confessional; he wields a power in some respects greater than that of the Pythoness who might determine with a word the fate of battles. Confession itself, however, has disappeared in the stronger and younger offshoots of Christianity. In orthodox Protestantism one is one’s self the judge of one’s own future, and possesses no other clew to one’s destiny than the dictum of one’s own conscience, with all its uncertainty upon its head. Owing to this transformation dogmatic faith in the word of a priest or a