which some excellent writer may be cited to prove
that it had reached a maximum of atrocity, such as should not easily
have been susceptible of aggravation, but which invariably the _relays_
through all the subsequent periods affirm their own contemporaries to
have attained. Every decennium is regularly worse than that which
precedes it, until the mind is perfectly confounded by the _Pelion upon
Ossa_ which must overwhelm the last term of the twenty-five. It is the
mere necessity of a logical _sorites_, that such a horrible race of
villains as the men of the twenty-fifth decennium ought not to be
suffered to breathe. Now, the whole error arises out of an imbecile
self-surrender to the first impressions from the process of abstraction
as applied to remote objects. Survey a town under the benefit of a ten
miles' distance, combined with a dreamy sunshine, and it will appear a
city of celestial palaces. Enter it, and you will find the same filth,
the same ruins, the same disproportions as anywhere else. So of past
ages, seen through the haze of an abstraction which removes all
circumstantial features of deformity. Call up any one of those ages, if
it were possible, into the realities of life, and these worthy praisers
of the past would be surprised to find every feature repeated which they
had fancied peculiar to their own times. Meanwhile this erroneous
doctrine of sermons has a double ill consequence: first, the whole
chain of twenty-five writers, when brought together, consecutively
reflect a colouring of absurdity upon each other; separately they might
be endurable, but all at once, predicating (each of his own period
exclusively) what runs with a rolling fire through twenty-five such
periods in succession, cannot but recall to the reader that senseless
doctrine of a physical decay in man, as if man were once stronger,
broader, taller, etc.--upon which hypothesis of a gradual descent why
should it have stopped at any special point? How could the human race
have failed long ago to reach the point of _zero_? But, secondly, such a
doctrine is most injurious and insulting to Christianity. If, after
eighteen hundred years of development, it could be seriously true of
Christianity that it had left any age or generation of men worse in
conduct, or in feeling, or in belief, than all their predecessors, what
reasonable expectation could we have that in eighteen hundred years more
the case would be better? Such thoughtless opinions