must be by this time ashamed of that ragged regiment of shallow thinkers, and obscure writers and talkers who at present infest our literature, and whose parrot-like repetition of their own stereotyped phraseology, mingled with some barbarous infusion of half Anglicised German, threatens to form as odious a cant as ever polluted the stream of thought or disfigured the purity of language.  Happily it is not likely to be more than a passing fashion; but still it is a very unpleasant fashion while it lasts.  As in Johnson’s day, every young writer imitated as well as he could the ponderous diction and everlasting antitheses of the great dictator as in Byron’s day, there were thousands to whom the world ‘was a blank’ at twenty or thereabouts, and of whose dark imaginings,’ as Macaulay says, the waste was prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists’, mystics and sceptics to whom everything is a ‘sham,’ an ‘unreality’; Who tell us that the world stands in need of a great ‘prophet,’ a seer,’ a ’true prophet’, a large soul,’ a god-like soul,’*—­who shall dive into ’the depths of the human consciousness,’ and whose ‘utterances’ shall rouse the human mind from the ‘cheats and frauds’ which have hitherto everywhere practised on its simplicity.  The tell us, in relation to philosophy, religion, and especially in relation to Christianity, that all that has been believed by mankind has been believed only on ‘empirical’ grounds; and that the old answers to difficulties will do no longer.  They shake their sage heads at such men as Clarke, Paley, Butler, and declare that such arguments as theirs will not satisfy them.,—­We are glad to admit that all this vague pretension is now but rarely displayed with the scurrilous spirit of that elder unbelief against which the long series of British apologists for Christianity arose between 1700 and 1750; But there is often in it an arrogance as real, though not in so offensive a form.  Sometimes the spirit of unbelief even assumes an air of sentimental regret at its own inconvenient profundity.  Many a worthy youth tells us he almost wishes he could believe.  He admires, of all things, the ’moral grandeur’—­the ‘ethical beauty’ of many parts of Christianity; he condescends to patronize Jesus Christ, though he believes that the great mass of words and actions by which alone we know anything about him, are sheer fictions or legends; he believes—­gratuitously enough in this instance, for he has no ground for it—­that Jesus Christ was a very ‘great man’ worthy of comparison at least with Mahomet, Luther, Napoleon, and ’other heroes’; he even admits that happiness of a simple, child-like faith, in the puerilities of Christianity—­it produces such content of mind!  But alas! he cannot believe—­his intellect is not satisfied—­he has revolved the matter too profoundly to be thus taken in; he must, he supposes, (and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but they will do no longer:  more radical, more tremendous difficulties have suggested themselves, ’from the ‘depths of philosophy,’ and far different answers are required now!+