an exceeding great multitude who are properly
described as sceptics. It is even more an age of doubt than of denial.
As Chateaubriand noted, when the century was yet young, "we are no
longer living in times when it avails to say 'Believe and do not
examine:' people will examine whether we like it or not." And since
these words were written, people have been busily examining in every
department of human thought, and especially in the domain of religion.
In particular Christianity has been made the subject of the most
searching scrutiny. How indeed could we expect that it should escape?
The greatest fact in the annals of the modern world, it naturally
invites the researches of the historian. The basis of the system of
ethics still current amongst us, it peremptorily claims the attention of
the sociologist. The fount of the metaphysical conceptions accepted in
Europe, until in the last century, before the "uncreating word" of
Lockian sensism,

"Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before
Sinks to her second cause, and is no more,"

it challenges the investigation of the psychologist. The practical
result of these inquiries must be allowed to be, to a large extent,
negative. In many quarters, where thirty or forty years ago we should
certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received
religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less
far-reaching, about "revealed religion" altogether, and, at the best,
"faint possible Theism," in the place of old-fashioned orthodoxy. And
earnest men, content to bear as best they may their own burden of doubt
and disappointment, do not dissemble to themselves that the immediate
outlook is dark and discouraging. Like the French monarch they discern
the omens of the deluge to come after them; a vast shipwreck of all
faith, and all virtue, of conscience, of God; brute force, embodied in
an omnipotent State, the one ark likely to escape submersion in the
pitiless waters. A world from which the high sanctions of religion,
hitherto the binding principle of society, are relegated to the domain
of old wives' fables; a march through life with its brief dream of
pleasure and long reality of thought to lie deeper than _all_ systems.
Those current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the
philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. Mind and
matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honour and interest,
virtue and vice--all