which have no positive basis.  He cannot go on adoring a hunger which he knows can never be satisfied, or cringing before fears which he knows will never be realised.  And even if this should for a time be possible, his case will be worse, not better.  Conscience, if it still remains with him, will remain not as a living thing—­a severe but kindly guide—­but as the menacing ghost of the religion he has murdered, and which comes to embitter degradation, not to raise it.  The moral life, it is true, will still exist for him, but it will probably, in literal truth,

                    Creep on a broken wing
    Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear.

But a state of things like this can hardly be looked forward to as conceivably of any long continuance.  Religion would come back, or conscience would go.  Nor do I think that the future which Dr. Newman seems to anticipate can be regarded as probable either.  He seems to anticipate a continuance side by side of faith and positivism, each with their own adherents, and fighting a ceaseless battle in which neither gains the victory.  I venture to submit that the new forms now at work in the world are not forms that will do their work by halves.  When once the age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the other—­they will be either impotent or omnipotent.  Their public exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast.  But the world feels uneasily that the import of it will be very different from what we are assured it is.  One English writer, indeed, on the positive side, has already seen clearly what the movement really means, whose continuance and whose consummation he declares to us to be a necessity. ‘Never,’ he says, ’in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.’[32]

The question I shall now proceed to is the exact causes of this movement, and the chances and the powers that the human race has of resisting it.

FOOTNOTES: 

[29] ’For my own part, I do not for one moment admit that morality is not strong enough to hold its own.’—­Prof.  Huxley, Nineteenth Century, May, 1877.

[30] These words may no doubt be easily pressed into a sense which Catholics would repudiate.  But if not pressed unduly, they represent what will, I believe, be admitted to be a fact.

[31] A letter to the Duke of Norfolk, by J.H.  Newman, D.D., p. 35.  Pickering:  1875.

[32] A Candid Examination of Theism.  By Physicus.  Truebner & Co.:  1878.

CHAPTER IX.