ott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate
(as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable
explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert
themselves in other directions. This is an age of scientific research
and scientific achievement. It is an age of material advancement, and in
those lines in which the human mind can "seek out many inventions." The
whole trend of human thought is under transformation. In ancient days
"a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon thick trees."
The man is famous now who makes some useful mechanical invention, or
explores some unknown territory, or bridges the oceans with swift
steamers, or belts the earth with new railways, or organizes powerful
financial combinations. If the law of demand and supply is as applicable
to mental products as it is to the imports of commerce, then we may
readily understand that the realm of the ideal, which was ruled by the
Wordsworths, Carlyles and Longfellows, should be supplanted by a realm
in which the master minds should be political economists, or explorers,
or railway kings, or financial magnates, or empire-builders of some
description. The philosophical and poetical yield to the practical, when
"_cui bono?_" is the lest question which challenges all comers. This
change, if it be an actual one, may bring its losses as well as its
gains. We are thankful for all the precious boons which inventive genius
has brought to us--for telegraphs, and telephones, and photographic
arts, for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and
sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid
achievements of skillful surgery. But the mind has its necessities as
well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may
never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an
"Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a
"Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa
Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" or a "Locksley Hall."

One characteristic of the present time is the radical and revolutionary
spirit which condemns everything that is "old," especially in the realm
of religion. It arrogantly claims that the "advanced thought" of this
highly cultured age has broken with the traditional beliefs of our
benighted ancestors, and that modern congregations are too highly
enlighted to accept those antiquated theologies. No