perception of so important a feature about us leads
to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,
who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous
position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked
whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth
century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the
said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for
an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt
like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of
the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a
much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old
Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in
the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of
heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little
feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare
epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such
times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on
mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely
lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least
indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of
its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there
is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in
us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The
once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formulae, whether of
mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'
are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the
conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those
which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of
motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an
enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle
over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in J