Far the most penetrating of all the influences that are impairing the moral and intellectual nerve of our generation, remain still to be mentioned.  The first of these is the immense increase of material prosperity, and the second is the immense decline in sincerity of spiritual interest.  The evil wrought by the one fills up the measure of the evil wrought by the other.  We have been, in spite of momentary declensions, on a flood tide of high profits and a roaring trade, and there is nothing like a roaring trade for engendering latitudinarians.  The effect of many possessions, especially if they be newly acquired, in slackening moral vigour, is a proverb.  Our new wealth is hardly leavened by any tradition of public duty such as lingers among the English nobles, nor as yet by any common custom of devotion to public causes, such as seems to live and grow in the United States.  Under such conditions, with new wealth come luxury and love of ease and that fatal readiness to believe that God has placed us in the best of possible worlds, which so lowers men’s aims and unstrings their firmness of purpose.  Pleasure saps high interests, and the weakening of high interests leaves more undisputed room for pleasure.  Management and compromise appear among the permitted arts, because they tend to comfort, and comfort is the end of ends, comprehending all ends.  Not truth is the standard, but the politic and the reputable.  Are we to suppose that it is firm persuasion of the greater scripturalness of episcopacy that turns the second generation of dissenting manufacturers in our busy Lancashire into churchmen?  Certainly such conversions do no violence to the conscience of the proselyte, for he is intellectually indifferent, a spiritual neuter.

That brings us to the root of the matter, the serious side of a revolution that in this social consequence is so unspeakably ignoble.  This root of the matter is the slow transformation now at work of the whole spiritual basis of thought.  Every age is in some sort an age of transition, but our own is characteristically and cardinally an epoch of transition in the very foundations of belief and conduct.  The old hopes have grown pale, the old fears dim; strong sanctions are become weak, and once vivid faiths very numb.  Religion, whatever destinies may be in store for it, is at least for the present hardly any longer an organic power.  It is not that supreme, penetrating, controlling, decisive part of a man’s life, which it has been, and will be again.  The work of destruction is all the more perturbing to timorous spirits, and more harassing even to doughtier spirits, for being done impalpably, indirectly, almost silently and as if by unseen hands.  Those who dwell in the tower of ancient faiths look about them in constant apprehension, misgiving, and wonder, with the hurried uneasy mien of people living amid earthquakes.  The air seems to their alarms to be full of missiles, and all is doubt, hesitation, and shivering expectancy.  Hence a decisive reluctance to commit one’s self.  Conscience has lost its strong and on-pressing energy, and the sense of personal responsibility lacks sharpness of edge.  The native hue of spiritual resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of distracted, wavering, confused thought.  The souls of men have become void.  Into the void have entered in triumph the seven devils of Secularity.