ng efficiently
and without corruption functions of supreme utility, and constituting
one of the main sources of spiritual and moral life in the community.
None of the modern influences of society can be said to have superseded
it. Modern experience has furnished much evidence of the insufficiency
of mere intellectual education if it is unaccompanied by the education
of character, and it is on this side that modern education is most
defective. While it undoubtedly makes men far more keenly sensible than
in the past to the vast inequalities of human lots, the habit of
constantly holding out material prizes as its immediate objects, and the
disappearance of those coercive methods of education which once
disciplined the will, make it perhaps less efficient as an instrument of
moral amelioration.

Some habits of thought also, that have grown rapidly among educated men,
have tended powerfully in the same direction. The sharp contrasts
between true and false in matters of theology have been considerably
attenuated. The point of view has changed. It is believed that in the
history of the world gross and material conceptions of religion have
been not only natural, but indispensable, and that it is only by a
gradual process of intellectual evolution that the masses of men become
prepared for higher and purer conceptions. Superstition and illusion
play no small part in holding together the great fabric of society.
'Every falsehood,' it has been said, 'is reduced to a certain
malleability by an alloy of truth,' and, on the other hand, truths of
the utmost moment are, in certain stages of the world's history, only
operative when they are clothed with a vesture of superstition. The
Divine Spirit filters down to the human heart through a gross and
material medium. And what is true of different stages of human history
is not less true of different contemporary strata of knowledge and
intelligence. In spite of democratic declamation about the equality of
man, it is more and more felt that the same kind of teaching is not good
for everyone. Truth, when undiluted, is too strong a medicine for many
minds. Some things which a highly cultivated intellect would probably
discard, and discard without danger, are essential to the moral being of
multitudes. There is in all great religious systems something that is
transitory and something that is eternal. Theological interpretations of
the phenomena of outward nature which surround and influence