and there an advanced scientist, like Sir Oliver Lodge, ignores
tradition, repudiates orthodox scientific restraints, and steps over the
border of actual or implied nihilism.

This smug nihilism with its superior air of scientific wisdom, is often
only the opposite pole of the dogmatic certitude of the churchman. Actual
knowledge of the human soul is quite as far removed from the one as from
the other. Credulity and Incredulity simply annul each other; often make
faces at each other; while Progress stalks alone in the middle of the
road, a "tramp" or a "vagabond," like Paracelsus, "reading the leaves of
the book of Nature," laughing at poverty, fleeing from persecution, yet
_knowing_, and "becoming a light to man forever."

The consensus of opinion among the presidents and professors in the
leading colleges and universities of this country, their unhesitating and
unqualified denial or repudiation of the claims set up by the church
regarding revelation and the basic dogmas of the Christian Religion, and
which his "Holiness" of the Vatican designates as "Modernism," reveal, not
only the "signs of the times," but show indisputably that modern education
has shaken itself free from the superstitions of the past, and repudiated
the old restraints to free thought and modern progress.

Orthodoxy in religious matters has often nothing to do in determining
college curriculums, in the selection of presidents, or in filling the
chairs.

Bright young men and women, the advanced students of the schools of
to-day, who are to become the leaders of thought and the teachers of
to-morrow, find little restraint and no formative element in the creeds
and dogmas that in the past have been so much in evidence, and so
constraining. Intensity of feeling has given place to breadth and
inclusiveness, and under the name of "Comparative Religions," ancient
faiths and modern, are classified, and studied like fossils in the
different ages of the past.

The "crusader impulse" has rather settled down in each individual breast,
as the master passion, to do, to dare, and to become something more and
better than the individual, or than the past has hitherto known. Such a
general period of intellectual activity, with so few restraints, history
nowhere else records, and the world has never before known.

Here lie the elements, the impulses, and the formative stage of the new
Avatar.

At this stage of our discussion it is of exceeding interest and imp