mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by early
Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, so
another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day. The leading
features of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may then
glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in its
successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present.

The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect
marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom;
and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a
natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring
universe, a harmonious universe.

In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of
thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge.
Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the
actual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and the
spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as
slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval.
With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms
of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer
humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the
study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity
and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers
and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a
rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which
were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle,
but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.

Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for
enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of
whatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual injuries,
degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human
history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and
which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."

Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of
strong personalities.

No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay
is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the
pre