Next, there is this point to remember.  Whilst during the Christian centuries, the devotion to a supernatural and extramundane aim has been engendering, as a recent writer has observed with indignation, a degrading ’pessimism as to the essential dignity of man,’[3] the world which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing its character for us.  In a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its old gorgeous colouring.  Once the world, with the human race, who were the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude—­the centre of the whole creation.  The mind had no larger conceptions that were vivid enough to dwarf it.  But now all this has changed.  In the words of a well-known modern English historian, ’The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, has sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, is seen to be but a small atom in the awful easiness of the universe.’[4] The whole position, indeed, is reversed.  The skies once seemed to pay the earth homage, and to serve it with light and shelter.  Now they do nothing, so far as the imagination is concerned, but spurn and dwarf it.  And when we come to the details of the earth’s surface itself, the case is just the same.  It, in its extent, has grown little and paltry to us.  The wonder and the mystery has gone from it.  A Cockney excursionist goes round it in a holiday trip; there are no

    Golden cities, ten months journey deep,
    In far Tartarian wilds;[5]

nor do the confines of civilisation, melt as they once did, into any unknown and unexplored wonderlands.  And thus a large mass of sentiment that was once powerful in the world is now rapidly dwindling, and, so far as we can see, there is nothing that can ever exactly replace it.  Patriotism, for instance, can never again be the religion it was to Athens, or the pride it was to Rome.  Men are not awed and moved as once they were by local and material splendours.  The pride of life, it is true, is still eagerly coveted; but by those at least who are most familiar with it, it is courted and sought for with a certain contempt and cynicism.  It is treated like a courtesan, rather than like a goddess.  Whilst as to the higher enthusiasm that was once excited by external things, the world in its present state could no more work itself up to this than a girl, after three seasons, could again go for dissipation to her dolls.  She might look back to the time of dolls with regret.  She might see that the interest they excited in her was, perhaps, far more pleasing than any she had found in love.  But the dolls would never rival her lovers, none the less.  And with man, and his aims and objects, the case is just the same.  And we must remember that to realise keenly the potency of a past ideal, is no indication that practically it will ever again be powerful.