"I wondered if you had felt that?" Gordon asked, as he leaned back in his chair and locked his powerful hands behind his head. "This presentiment of overwhelming change haunts me day and night and makes many things seem childish and futile. "Ill and feverish from overwork one day last week, I stood by my window, looking down on the city, dreaming and listening to its cries for help, watching the sweep of the elevated trains coming and going, and I was overwhelmed with the immensity of its complex life. Our hurrying cars carry within the corporate limits daily more passengers than all the railroads of the western hemisphere. I thought of the rivers of human flesh that flow unceasingly through its streets and flood its market places. And these millions are but one wave of the ocean forever breaking on the shores of time, its tides everlasting, insistent, resistless, never pausing, behind them the pressure of the heaped centuries, and over them the lowering clouds of fresh storms soon to burst and add their tons." He paused and closed his eyes as though to shut out the roar, while she listened with half-parted lips. "And as I looked out the window I had a startling experience. I saw a huge dragon-like beast begin to crawl slowly down from the hills and stretch his big claws over the housetops of the city below. I was not asleep or in a trance, but wide awake, only a little feverish. With increasing horror I watched this monster stretch his enormous body, covered with scales, and short hair growing between the scales, on and on, until he covered the city and gathered its thousands of houses within his huge paws. His eyes were enormous and blood-red, his breath hot. "I moved back, gasping with surprise and horror, to find it was only a spider crawling down his slender thread on the window close to my eye. It was a fevered delusion, but it haunted me for days, and haunts me still. "I am growing in the conviction that the very foundations of morals are shifting, and that Religion, Society and Civilisation must readjust themselves or humanity sink into unspeakable degradation. "Belief in the old religious authority is gone. Our church is thronged because of a peculiar personal power with which I am endowed. I could wield that power without a church, society, creed or Bible. Esthetic forces now draw people to non-ritualistic churches that once came for prayer and preaching. The preacher must secularise his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."