like the bitterness of a woman against her lover, which has not been the cause of her resolving to leave him, but which has been caused by his having left her.  In estimating what is really the state of feeling about us, we must not look only at the surface.  We must remember that deep feeling often expresses itself by contradicting itself; also that it often exists where it is not expressed at all, or where it betrays rather than expresses itself; and, further, that during the hours of common intercourse, it tends, for the time being, to disappear.  People cannot be always exclaiming in drawing-rooms that they have lost their Lord; and the fact may be temporarily forgotten because they have lost their portmanteau.  All serious reflections are like reflections in water—­a pebble will disturb them, and make a dull pond sparkle.  But the sparkle dies, and the reflection comes again.  And there are many about us, though they never confess their pain, and perhaps themselves hardly like to acknowledge it, whose hearts are aching for the religion that they can no longer believe in.  Their lonely hours, between the intervals of gaiety, are passed with barren and sombre thoughts; and a cry rises to their lips but never passes them.

Amongst such a class it is somehow startling to find the most unlikely people at times placing themselves.  Professor Clifford, for instance, who of all our present positivists is most uproarious in his optimism, has yet admitted that the religion he invites us to trample on is, under certain forms, an ennobling and sustaining thing; and for such theism as that of Charles Kingsley’s he has expressed his deepest reverence.  Again, there is Professor Huxley.  He denies with the most dogmatic and unbending severity any right to man to any supernatural faith; and he ‘will not for a moment admit’ that our higher life will suffer in consequence.[29] And yet ‘the lover of moral beauty,’ he says wistfully, ’struggling through a world of sorrow and sin, is surely as much the stronger for believing that sooner or later a vision of perfect peace and goodness will burst upon him, as the toiler up a mountain for the belief that beyond crag and snow lie home and rest.’  And he adds, as we have seen already, that could a faith like what he here indicates be placed upon a firm basis, mankind would cling to it as ’tenaciously as ever a drowning sailor did to a hen-coop.’  But all this wide-spread and increasing feeling is felt at present to be of no avail.  The wish to believe is there; but the belief is as far off as ever.  There is a power in the air around us by which man’s faith seems paralysed.  The intellect, we were thinking but now, had acquired a new vigour and a clearer vision; but the result of this growth is, with many, to have made it an incubus, and it lies upon all their deepest hopes and wishes

                  Like a weight
    Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.