materialism have been at work among us.  If proof of this were needed, nothing could afford it more clearly than our loss of peace and dignity in modern society.  Many costly luxuries have become necessities, and they have increased the pace of life to a rush and fury which makes business a turmoil and social life a fever.  A symbolic embodiment of this spirit may be seen in the motor car and the aeroplane as they are often used.  These indeed need not be ministers of paganism.  The glory of swift motion and the mounting up on wings as eagles reach very near to the spiritual, if not indeed across its borderland, as exhilarating and splendid stimuli to the human spirit.  But, on the other hand, they may be merely instruments for gratifying that insane human restlessness which is but the craving for new sensations.  Along the whole line of our commercial and industrial prosperity there runs one great division.  There are some who, in the midst of all change, have preserved their old spiritual loyalties, and there are others who have substituted novelty for loyalty.  These are the idealists and the pagans of the twentieth century.

Another potent factor in the making of the new times was the scientific advance which has made so remarkable a difference to the whole outlook of man upon the earth.  Darwin’s great discovery is perhaps the most epoch-making fact in science that has yet appeared upon the earth.  The first apparent trend of evolution seemed to be an entirely materialistic reaction.  This was due to the fact that believers in the spiritual had identified with their spirituality a great deal that was unnecessary and merely casual.  If the balloon on which people mount up above the earth is any such theory as that of the six days’ creation, it is easy to see how when that balloon is pricked the spiritual flight of the time appears to have ended on the ground.

Of course all that has long passed by.  Of late years Haeckel has been crying out that all his old friends have deserted him and have gone over to the spiritual side—­a cry which reminds one of the familiar juryman who finds his fellows the eleven most obstinate men he has ever known.  The conception of evolution has long since been taken over by the idealists, and has become perhaps the most splendidly Christian and idealistic idea of the new age.  When Darwin published his Origin of Species, Hegel cried out in Germany, “Darwin has destroyed design.”  To-day Darwin and Hegel stand together as the prophets of the unconquerable conviction of the reality of spirit.  From the days of Huxley and Haeckel we have passed over to the days of Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge.