lor did to a hen-coop_.' But all this wide-spread
and increasing feeling is felt at present to be of no avail. The wish to
believe is there; but the belief is as far off as ever. There is a power
in the air around us by which man's faith seems paralysed. The
intellect, we were thinking but now, had acquired a new vigour and a
clearer vision; but the result of this growth is, with many, to have
made it an incubus, and it lies upon all their deepest hopes and wishes

_Like a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life._

Such is the condition of mind that is now spreading rapidly, and which,
sooner or later, we must look steadily in the face. Nor is it confined
to those who are its direct victims. Those who still cling, and cling
firmly, to belief are in an indirect way touched by it. Religion cannot
fail to be changed by the neighbourhood of irreligion. If it is
persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not
persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled. Believers and
unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these
days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life. They are
united by habits, by blood, and by friendship, and they are each obliged
continually to ignore or excuse what they hold to be the errors of the
other. In a state of things like this, it is plain that the conviction
of believers can have neither the fierce intensity that belongs to a
minority under persecution, nor the placid confidence that belongs to an
overwhelming majority. They can neither hate the unbelievers, for they
daily live in amity with them, nor despise altogether their judgment,
for the most eminent thinkers of the day belong to them. By such
conditions as these the strongest faith cannot fail to be affected. As
regards the individuals who retain it, it may not lose its firmness, but
it must lose something of its fervour; and as regards its own future
hold upon the human race, it is faith no longer, but is anxious doubt,
or, at best, a desperate trust. Dr. Newman has pointed out how even the
Pope has recognised in the sedate and ominous rise of our modern
earth-born positivism some phenomenon vaster and of a different nature
from the outburst of a petulant heresy; he seems to recognise it as a
belligerent rather than a rebel.[30] '_One thing_,' says Dr. Newman,
'_except by an almost miraculous interposition, cannot be; and that is a
return to the universal religio