and deep way,
but in a dim wearied way,--the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and
uncomfortableness of soul and body. The Middle Ages had their wars and
agonies, but also intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood;
but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was inwoven with white and
purple: ours is one seamless stuff of brown. Not that we are without
apparent festivity, but festivity more or less forced, mistaken,
embittered, incomplete--not of the heart. How wonderfully, since
Shakspere's time, have we lost the power of laughing at bad jests! The
very finish of our wit belies our gaiety.

The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, our
want of faith. There never yet was a generation of men (savage or
civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled the words
"having no hope, and without God in the world,"[113] as the present
civilized European race. A Red Indian or Otaheitan savage has more
sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than
the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians: and those among us
who may in some sense be said to believe, are divided almost without
exception into two broad classes, Romanist and Puritan; who, but for
the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, would, either
of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as possible to ashes; the
Romanist having always done so whenever he could, from the beginning
of their separation, and the Puritan at this time holding himself in
complacent expectation of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire.
Such division as this between persons nominally of one religion, that
is to say, believing in the same God, and the same Revelation, cannot
but become a stumbling-block of the gravest kind to all thoughtful and
far-sighted men,--a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under
the most favourable circumstances of early education. Hence, nearly
all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the
best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the
plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what
practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men
are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves
definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and
benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter and
fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott),