Such is the condition of mind that is now spreading rapidly, and which, sooner or later, we must look steadily in the face.  Nor is it confined to those who are its direct victims.  Those who still cling, and cling firmly, to belief are in an indirect way touched by it.  Religion cannot fail to be changed by the neighbourhood of irreligion.  If it is persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled.  Believers and unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life.  They are united by habits, by blood, and by friendship, and they are each obliged continually to ignore or excuse what they hold to be the errors of the other.  In a state of things like this, it is plain that the conviction of believers can have neither the fierce intensity that belongs to a minority under persecution, nor the placid confidence that belongs to an overwhelming majority.  They can neither hate the unbelievers, for they daily live in amity with them, nor despise altogether their judgment, for the most eminent thinkers of the day belong to them.  By such conditions as these the strongest faith cannot fail to be affected.  As regards the individuals who retain it, it may not lose its firmness, but it must lose something of its fervour; and as regards its own future hold upon the human race, it is faith no longer, but is anxious doubt, or, at best, a desperate trust.  Dr. Newman has pointed out how even the Pope has recognised in the sedate and ominous rise of our modern earth-born positivism some phenomenon vaster and of a different nature from the outburst of a petulant heresy; he seems to recognise it as a belligerent rather than a rebel.[30] ‘One thing,’ says Dr. Newman, ’except by an almost miraculous interposition, cannot be; and that is a return to the universal religious sentiment, the public opinion, of the mediaeval time.  The Pope himself calls those centuries “the ages of faith.”  Such endemic faith may certainly be decreed for some future time; but as far as we have the means of judging at present, centuries must run out first.’[31]

In this last sentence is indicated the vast and universal question, which the mind of humanity is gathering itself together to ask—­will the faith that we are so fast losing ever again revive for us?  And my one aim in this book has been to demonstrate that the entire future tone of life, and the entire course of future civilisation, depends on the answer which this question receives.

There is, however, this further point to consider.  Need the answer we are speaking of be definite and universal? or can we look forward to its remaining undecided till the end of time?  Now I have already tried to make it evident that for the individual, at any rate, it must by-and-by be definite one way or the other.  The thorough positive thinker will not be able to retain in supreme power principles