ates an active interest in the vital problems of the day deserves
the support of all thinking men; and I propose to consider briefly some
of the principles by which we should be guided in doing whatever we can
to promote such an interest.

[1] Address to West London Ethical Society, 4th December, 1892.

We are told often enough that we are living in a period of important
intellectual and social revolutions. In one way we are perhaps inclined
even to state the fact a little too strongly. We suffer at times from
the common illusion that the problems of to-day are entirely new: we
fancy that nobody ever thought of them before, and that when we have
solved them, nobody will ever need to look for another solution. To
ardent reformers in all ages it seems as if the millennium must begin
with their triumph, and that their triumph will be established by a
single victory. And while some of us are thus sanguine, there are many
who see in the struggles of to-day the approach of a deluge which is to
sweep away all that once ennobled life. The believer in the old creeds,
who fears that faith is decaying, and the supernatural life fading from
the world, denounces the modern spirit as materialising and degrading.
The conscience of mankind, he thinks, has become drugged and lethargic;
our minds are fixed upon sensual pleasures, and our conduct regulated
by a blind struggle for the maximum of luxurious enjoyment. The period
in his eyes is a period of growing corruption; modern society suffers
under a complication of mortal diseases, so widely spread and deeply
seated that at present there is no hope of regeneration. The best hope
is that its decay may provide the soil in which seed may be sown of a
far-distant growth of happier augury. Such dismal forebodings are no
novelty. Every age produces its prophecies of coming woes. Nothing
would be easier than to make out a catena of testimonies from great men
at every stage of the world's history, declaring each in turn that the
cup of iniquity was now at last overflowing, and that corruption had
reached so unprecedented a step that some great catastrophe must be
approaching. A man of unusually lofty morality is, for that reason,
more keenly sensitive to the lowness of the average standard, and too
easily accepts the belief that the evils before his eyes must be in
fact greater, and not, as may perhaps be the case, only more vividly
perceived, than those of the bygone ages. A call to rep