Turn we lastly to the influences of the Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion.[8] Judging from Darwin’s experience, as that of a typical man of science, just as such a one becomes an embodiment of the Scientific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion” experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years, when Science had made him all her own: “_Now_ the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colorblind” (_Life_, vol. i. p. 311). Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his “Life” in the _Spectator_ wrote: “No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience.” The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be found, I believe: 1st, in the closing up of that “Gate called Beautiful,” through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple; 2d, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual inquiry; and, 3d, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern Scientific and the Religious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings of critical or philosophical researches on the doctrines of either natural or traditional religion. Had Science inspired her votaries with religious _sentiment_, they would have broken their way through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a highway of Faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable things to anticipate now in the world is a Scientific Religious Reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism; namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of the Age has reached this point. It is contented to be Agnostic, not Atheistic. It says aloud, “I don’t know.” It mutters to those who listen, “I don’t care.”