it are like soldiers who may be fighting more bravely perhaps than ever; but who are fighting, though none observe it, with the death-wound under their uniforms.  Of all the signs of the times, these high-minded unbelievers are thought to be the most reassuring; but really they are the very reverse of this.  The reason why their true condition has passed unnoticed is, that it is a condition that is naturally silent, and that has great difficulty in finding a mouthpiece.  The only two parties who have had any interest in commenting on it have been the very parties least able to understand, and most certain to distort it.  They have been either the professed champions of theism, or else the visionary optimists of positivism; the former of whom have had no sympathy with positive principles, and the latter no discernment of their results.  The class of men we are considering are equally at variance with both of these; they agree with each in one respect, and in another they agree with neither.  They agree with the one that religious belief is false; they agree with the other that unbelief is miserable.  What wonder then that they should have kept their condition to themselves?  Nearly all public dealing with it has been left to men who can praise the only doctrines that they can preach as true, or who else can condemn as false the doctrines that they deplore as mischievous.  As for the others, whose mental and moral convictions are at variance, they have neither any heart to proclaim the one, nor any intellectual standpoint from which to proclaim the other.  Their only impulse is to struggle and to endure in silence.  Let us, however, try to intrude upon their privacy, even though it be rudely and painfully, and see what their real state is; for it is these men who are the true product of the present age, its most special and distinguishing feature, and the first-fruits of what we are told is to be the philosophy of the enlightened future.

To begin, then, let us remember what these men were when Christians; and we shall be better able to realise what they are now.  They were men who believed firmly in the supreme and solemn importance of life, in the privilege that it was to live, despite all temporal sorrow.  They had a rule of conduct which would guide them, they believed, to the true end of their being—­to an existence satisfying and excellent beyond anything that imagination could suggest to them; they had the dread of a corresponding ruin to fortify themselves in their struggle against the wrong; and they had a God ever present, to help and hear, and take pity on them.  And yet even thus, selfishness would beset the most unselfish, and weariness the most determined.  How hard the battle was, is known to all; it has been the most prominent commonplace in human thought and language.  The constancy and the strength of temptation, and the insidiousness of the arguments it was supported by, has been proverbial.  To explain away the difference between good and evil,