Epicurism which, in
my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it
looks at first sight most like an angel of light. The mass, again,
are fancying that they are still adhering to the old creeds, the old
church, to the honoured patriarchs of English Protestantism. I wish
I could agree with them in their belief about themselves. To me
they seem--with a small sprinkling of those noble and cheering
exceptions to popular error which are to be found in every age of
Christ's church--to be losing most fearfully and rapidly the living
spirit of Christianity, and to be, for that very reason, clinging
all the more convulsively--and who can blame them?--to the outward
letter of it, whether High Church or Evangelical; unconscious, all
the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into
that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always
heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most
blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.

In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least
of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling. I know
well that my sketch is inadequate and partial: I have every reason
to believe, from the criticisms which I have received since its
first publication, that it is, as far as it goes, correct. I put it
as a problem. It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more
than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be
found. I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no
right to start doubts without answering them. I can only answer,--
Would that I had started them! would that I was not seeing them
daily around me, under some form or other, in just the very hearts
for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed and
healthy faith. To the young, this book can do no harm; for it will
put into their minds little but what is there already. To the
elder, it may do good; for it may teach some of them, as I earnestly
hope, something of the real, but too often utterly unsuspected,
state of their own children's minds; something of the reasons of
that calamitous estrangement between themselves and those who will
succeed them, which is often too painful and oppressive to be
confessed to their own hearts! Whatever amount of obloquy this book
may bring upon me, I shall think that a light price to pay, if by it
I shall have helped, even in a sing