And so it is with the world’s history.  Isolate certain phenomena, and they do, without doubt, repeat themselves; but it is only when isolated that they can be said to do so.  In many points the European thought and civilisation of to-day may seem to be a repetition of what has been before; we may fancy that we recognise our brothers in the past, and that we can, as the writer above quoted says, shake hands with them across the intervening years.  But this is really only a deceiving fancy, when applied to such deep and universal questions as those we have now to deal with—­to religion, to positive thought, and to the worth of life.  The positivists and the unbelievers of the modern world, are not the same as those of the ancient world.  Even when their language is identical, there is an immeasurable gulf between them.  In our denials and assertions there are certain new factors, which at once make all such comparisons worthless.  The importance of these will by-and-by appear more clearly, but I shall give a brief account of them now.

The first of these factors is the existence of Christianity, and that vast and undoubted change in the world of which it has been at once the cause and the index.  It has done a work, and that work still remains:  and we all feel the effects of it, whether we will or no.  Described in the most general way, that work has been this.  The supernatural, in the ancient world, was something vague and indefinite:  and the classical theologies at any rate, though they were to some extent formal embodiments of it, could embody really but a very small part.  Zeus and the Olympian hierarchies were dimly perceived to be encircled by some vaster mystery; which to the popular mind was altogether formless, and which even such men as Plato could only describe inadequately.  The supernatural was like a dim and diffused light, brighter in some places, and darker in others, but focalised and concentrated nowhere.  Christianity has focalised it, united into one the scattered points of brightness, and collected other rays that were before altogether imperceptible.  That vague ‘idea of the good,’ of which Plato said most men dimly augured the existence, but could not express their augury, has been given a definite shape to by Christianity in the form of its Deity.  That Deity, from an external point of view, may be said to have acquired His sovereignty as did the Roman Caesar.  He absorbed into His own person the offices of all the gods that were before him, as the Roman Caesar absorbed all the offices of the state; and in His case also, as has been said of the Roman Caesar, the whole was immeasurably greater than the mere sum of the parts.  Scientifically and philosophically He became the first cause of the world; He became the father of the human soul, and its judge; and what is more, its rest and its delight, and its desire.  Under the light of this conception, man appeared an ampler being.  His thoughts were for ever being gazed