at
the museums and the institutes.

Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at
work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a
result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which
churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned.
As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault
is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the
indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new
and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the
one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort
d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round
table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages
called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the
slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble
burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and
workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how
they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and
beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the
atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them.
Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of
it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the
dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general
exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what
they mean by goodness--these are all which now remain to us; and thrown
into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet
experienced, we are left to wind our way through the labyrinth of its
details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge,
our own hopes and desires.

We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the
same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we
cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake
to teach us ought to have made up their minds.

On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something
left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of
and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is
necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and
we may well smile at the