prophet tends to become a simple reliance on the voice of conscience, which becomes ever less and less authoritative, ever more and more feeble in the face of doubt. Faith in oracles and in the visible finger of Providence in this world has become to-day simply a somewhat hesitating reliance upon an inner oracle and an together transcendental Providence. This is one of the items in respect to which religious evolution may be considered as already something like complete, and religious individualism as on the point of replacing obedience to the priest, and the negation of the marvellous as substituted for antique superstition. [Sidenote: Belief in God falls with belief in devils.] The strength of the belief in a personal God has been in all times proportionate to the strength of the belief in a devil—we have just seen an illustration of it in the case of Luther. In effect these two beliefs are correlatives; they are the opposite faces of one and the same anthropomorphism. Well, in our days, belief in the devil is incontestably becoming feebler; and this enfeeblement is even especially characteristic of the present epoch; there has at no other time been anything to equal it. There is not an educated person to be found in whom the notion of a devil does not excite a smile. That, believe me, is a sign of the times, a manifest proof of the decline of dogmatic religion. Wherever the power of dogmatic religion by an exception to the general course of things has retained its vitality, and retained it, as in America, even to the point of giving birth to new dogmas, the fear of the devil has subsisted in its entirety; wherever, as in more enlightened regions than America, this fear no longer exists except as a symbol or a myth, the intensity and the fecundity of the religious sentiment decline inevitably in the same degree. The fate of Javeh is bound up with that of Lucifer; angels and devils go hand in hand, as in some fantastic mediæval dance. The day when Satan and his followers shall be definitively vanquished and annihilated in the minds of the people, the celestial powers will not have long to live. * * * * * [Sidenote: Results.]