Indolence and timidity have united to popularise among us a flaccid latitudinarianism, which thinks itself a benign tolerance for the opinions of others.  It is in truth only a pretentious form of being without settled opinions of our own, and without any desire to settle them.  No one can complain of the want of speculative activity at the present time in a certain way.  The air, at a certain social elevation, is as full as it has ever been of ideas, theories, problems, possible solutions, suggested questions, and proffered answers.  But then they are at large, without cohesion, and very apt to be the objects even in the more instructed minds of not much more than dilettante interest.  We see in solution an immense number of notions, which people think it quite unnecessary to precipitate in the form of convictions.  We constantly hear the age lauded for its tolerance, for its candour, for its openness of mind, for the readiness with which a hearing is given to ideas that forty years ago, or even less than that, would have excluded persons suspected of holding them from decent society, and in fact did so exclude them.  Before, however, we congratulate ourselves too warmly on this, let us be quite sure that we are not mistaking for tolerance what is really nothing more creditable than indifference.  These two attitudes of mind, which are so vitally unlike in their real quality, are so hard to distinguish in their outer seeming.

One is led to suspect that carelessness is the right name for what looks like reasoned toleration, by such a line of consideration as the following.  It is justly said that at the bottom of all the great discussions of modern society lie the two momentous questions, first whether there is a God, and second whether the soul is immortal.  In other words, whether our fellow-creatures are the highest beings who take an interest in us, or in whom we need take an interest; and, then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious.  It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds.  Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme enigmas.  Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt before now on questions of far less tremendous import.  Ours, as has been truly said, is ‘a time of loud disputes and weak convictions,’ In a generation deeply impressed by a sense of intellectual responsibility this could not be.  As it is, even superior men are better pleased to play about the height of these great arguments, to fly in busy intellectual sport