emotion--to destroy those shams which impede our progress and curtail our prosperity and happiness. It is ludicrous to say that we cannot thus cultivate mind unless we believe it to be an indivisible and incomprehensible and indefinable something. It would, in fact, be less absurd to say that we should have more confidence in our power to cultivate mind if we regarded it as an organic function, subject to definite treatment. As to the lapse of a belief in personal immortality, it is not less absurd to say that this would paralyse our efforts. As Ruskin says on the point: "The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him." That magnificent preface to _The Crown of Wild Olive_ ought long ago to have silenced these dismal sophists. The fact is, that this age of ours, in proportion as it grows indifferent to the old legends and the appeals of the clergy, rises toward heights which man never climbed before. The clergy are most amusingly puzzled. Popes tell us that we are children of perdition, reeling into an earthly abyss, to say nothing of a deeper beyond: archbishops say that we are just beginning to realise the true import of Christ's teaching. The candid man or woman will look searchingly for himself or herself into the heart of our age, and, if he or she have an accurate knowledge of earlier ages, will recognise that it throbs with a human idealism, tenderness, and sympathy which have been unknown in Europe since the old pagans departed. Let me end on that note. The religious person will close this work, if he perseveres to the end, with a series of horrified exclamations. Socialism! Immoralism! Republicanism! Materialism! Malthusianism! I shudder under the shower of horrid epithets, yet would ask this outraged reader to forget "'isms" for a moment and consider a simple statement of the human faith I here present.