If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel, that your
lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed
in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the
senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings of
a worn-out superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel,
to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at
all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves
the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or
spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all
this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold
after stronghold has fallen till it is clear almost to demonstration
that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed
all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man
has no knowledge of the invisible on which he can build. Let him own
the truth and turn to that upon which he _can_ build safely—the world
of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content
with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling
you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in
daily communion with the unseen—that so only you can loyally control
the visible—are either wilfully deceiving you or are dreamers and
visionaries.
So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes
through our literature, and colors the life of the streets and markets
in a thousand ways; and a mammon-ridden generation, longing to be rid
of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which
they _try_ to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make
them uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds
as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the
flesh-pots publicly declared and recognized.
Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you may be ready
and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts;
in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old
things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom
since Luther nailed his protest on the church-door of a German village.