at once, as if a theological epidemic were abroad, or a synod of all the churches were in session.  It has also another peculiarity.  The thought which may occur at first to but one mind seems to have an affinity to all minds; and if it be a free and generous thought, it is instantly caught, intuitively comprehended, and received with acclamations all over the world.  Such a spirit as this is rapidly bringing all sections and classes of mankind into sympathy with one another, and producing a supreme caste in human nature, which, as it increases in numbers, will mould the character and control the destinies of the race.

So far we speak of the upper air of the day.  But there is no denying the prevalence of a lower and baser spirit.  We are uncomfortably aware that there is another extreme to the freaks of the imagination.  There are superstitions of the reason and of realism,—­the grotesque fancies, mysticisms, and vagaries which prevail, and the diseased gusto for something ultra and outlandish which affects many raw and undisciplined minds.  Yet even these are, in their way, indications of the pervading disposition,—­the unhealthy exhalations to be expected from hitherto stagnant regions, stirred up by the active and regenerating thought of the time.  There is promise even in them, and they serve to distinguish the more that purer and higher spirit of honesty and reality, which clarifies the intellect, and invigorates the faculties that apprehend and grasp the noble and the true.

We glory in this triumph of the reason over the imagination, and in this predominance of the real over the ideal.  We prefer that common sense should lead the van, and that mere fancy, like the tinselled conjurer behind his hollow table and hollow apparatus, should be taken for what it is, and that its tricks and surprises should cease to bamboozle, however much they may amuse mankind.  Nothing, in the course of Providence, conveys so much encouragement as this recent and growing development of reality in thought and pursuit.  In its presence the future of the world looks substantial and sure.  We dream of an immense change in the tone of the human spirit, and in the character of the civilization which shall in time embower the earth.

But, as it has always been, the greater the good, the nearer the evil; Satan is next-door neighbor to the saint; Eden had a lurking-hole for the serpent.  Just here the voyaging is most dangerous; just here we drop the plummet and strike upon a shoal; we lift up our eyes, and discover a lee-shore.

The mind that is not profound enough to perceive and believe even what it cannot comprehend,—­that is the shoal.  Unless the reason will permit the sounding-lead to fall illimitably down into a submarine world of mystery, too deep for the diver, and yet a true and living world,—­unless there is admitted to be a fathomless gulf, called faith, underlying the surface-sea of demonstration, the race