An analogous thesis is maintained with great cleverness in a book which caused considerable stir in England: Mr. Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma.” The author, in common with religious critics generally, remarks the growing tension that nowadays exists between science and dogma. “An inevitable revolution, of which we all recognize the beginnings and signs, but which has already spread, perhaps, farther than most of us think, is befalling the religion in which we have been brought up.” Mr. Arnold is right. At no former period have unbelievers appeared to have so strong a hold in right reason; the old arguments against providence, miracles, and final causes, that the Epicureans brought into prominence, seem as nothing beside the arguments furnished in our days by the Laplaces and the Lamarcks, and quite recently by Darwin, the “evictor of miracles,” in Strauss’ phrase. One of the sacred prophets whom Mr. Arnold is fond of quoting once said: “Behold, the days come, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.” The time predicted by the prophet Mr. Arnold might well recognize as our own; might it not with truth be said of the present that it lacks the word of the Eternal, or soon will lack it? A new spirit animates our generation; not only are we in doubt whether the Eternal ever did speak or ever does speak to man, but many of us believe in the existence of no other eternity than that of a universe of mute and unfeeling matter which keeps its own secret except as against those who have the wit to find it out. There are of course, even to-day, some few faithful servants in the houses of the Lord; but the Master seems to have departed for the far countries of the past, to which memory alone has access. In Russia in the older seigniorial estates, a disc of iron is fastened to the wall of the mansion of the lord of the soil; and when he returns from a journey, the first night he passes in his dominion, some follower runs to the disc of iron and in the silence of the night beats upon the metal to announce his vigilance and the presence of the master. Who will awaken nowadays the voice of the bells in the church-steeples to announce the return to His temple of the living God, and the vigilance of the faithful? To-day the sound of the church-bells is as melancholy as a cry in the void; they tell of the deserted house of God, of the absence of the lord of the soil, they sound the knell of the believers. And is there nothing that can be done to domesticate religion once more in the heart of man? There is but one means: to see in God no more than a symbol of what exists always at the bottom of the human heart—morality. And it is to this expedient that Matthew Arnold also turns his attention.