It is a complaint often made by religious historians, that no church can sustain its spirituality unimpaired through two generations, and that in the third a total irreligion is apt to supervene.  Sometimes indeed the transitions are abrupt, from an age of piety to an age of dissoluteness.  The liability to such lamentable revulsions is plainly due to some insufficiency in the religion to meet all the wants of human nature.  To scold at that nature is puerile, and implies an ignorance of the task which religion undertakes.  To lay the fault on the sovereign will of God, who has “withheld his grace” from the grandchildren of the pious, might be called blasphemy, if we were disposed to speak harshly.  The fault lies undoubtedly in the fact, that Practical Devoutness and Free Thought stand apart in unnatural schism.  But surely the age is ripe for something better;—­for a religion which stall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness, that are the glory of the purest Christianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, and strict adherence to impartial principle, which the schools of modern science embody.  When a spiritual church has its senses exercised to discern good and evil, judges of right and wrong by an inward power, proves all things and holds fast that which is good, fears no truth, but rejoices in being corrected, intellectually as well as morally,—­it will not be liable to be “carried to and fro” by shifting winds of doctrine.  It will indeed have movement, namely, a steady onward one, as the schools of science have had, since they left off to dogmatize, and approached God’s world as learners; but it will lay aside disputes of words, eternal vacillations, mutual illwill and dread of new light, and will be able without hypocrisy to proclaim “peace on earth and goodwill towards men,” even towards those who reject its beliefs and sentiments concerning “God and his glory.”

NOTE ON PAGE 168.

The author of the “Eclipse of Faith,” in his Defence (p. 168), referring to my reply in p. 101 above, says:—­“In this very paragraph Mr. Newman shows that I have not misrepresented him, nor is it true that I overlooked his novel hypothesis.  He says that ’Gibbon is exhibiting and developing the deep-seated causes of the spread of Christianity before Constantine,’—­which Mr. Newman says had not spread.  On the contrary; he assumes that the Christians were ’a small fraction,’ and thus does dismiss in two sentences, I might have said three words, what Gibbon had strained every nerve in his celebrated chapter to account for.”

Observe his phrase, “On the contrary.”  It is impossible to say more plainly, that Gibbon represents the spread of Christianity before Constantine to have been very great, and then laboured in vain to account for that spread; and that I, arbitrarily setting aside Gibbon’s fact as to the magnitude of the “spread,” cut the knot which he could not untie.