western world; and the western world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the east.  Thus opinions that the present age is forming for itself have a weight and a volume that opinions never before possessed.  They are the first beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion—­an oecumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position.  The great question is, what shape finally will this dawning self-consciousness take?  Will it contain in it that negation of the supernatural which our positive assertions are at present supposed to necessitate?  If so, then it is not possible to conceive that this last development of humanity, this stupendous break from the past which is being accomplished by our understanding of it, will not be the sort of break which takes place when a man awakes from a dream, and finds all that he most prized vanished from him.  It is impossible to conceive that this awakening, this discovery by man of himself, will not be the beginning of his decadence; that it will not be the discovery on his part that he is a lesser and a lower thing than he thought he was, and that his condition will not sink till it tallies with his own opinion of it.

If this be really the case, we shall not be able to dispose of pessimism by calling it a disease; for the disease will be real and universal, and pessimism will be nothing but the scientific description of it.  The pessimist is only silenced by being called diseased, when it is meant that the disease imputed to him is either hypochondriacal or peculiar to himself.  But in the present case the disease is real, deep-seated, and extending steadily.  The only question for us is, is it curable or incurable?  This the event alone can answer:  but as no future can be produced but through the agency of the present, the event, to a certain extent, must be in our own hands.  For us, at any rate, the first thing to be done is to face boldly our own present condition, and the causes that are producing it.  To become alive to our danger is the one way to escape from it.  But the danger is at present felt rather than known.  The class of men we are considering are conscious, as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, ‘of a void that mines the breast;’ but each thinks that this is a fancy only, and hardly dares communicate it to his fellows.  Here and there, however, by accident, it is already finding unintended expression; and signs come to the surface of the vague distrust and misgiving that are working under it.  The form it takes amongst the general masses that are affected by it is, as might be expected, practical rather than analytical.  They are conscious of the loss that the loss of faith is to them; and more or less coherently they long for its recovery.  Outwardly, indeed, they may often sneer at it; but outward signs in such matters are very deceiving.  Much of the bitter and arrogant certitude to be found about us in the expression of unbelief, is really