ng century. The future of the West
Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the
spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men
will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form
and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman
Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed
had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning
materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen
and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for
1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The
masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The
masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal
retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the
misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus.
Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than
welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it
was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because
the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature
of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made
wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against
the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can
search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or
the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only
uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a
personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a
subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific
explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a
constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed,
however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly
professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might
become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain
the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the
reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but
wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the
presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the
Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind o