ce a body of doubt which clouds the outlook of multitudes upon
religion generally. Beyond debate a kind of eclipse of faith began to
draw across the Western world so early as the middle of the last
century. The militant skepticism of the brilliant group of younger poets
who sang their defiances in the first two decades of the nineteenth
century to a world which professed itself duly shocked, is wholly
different from the sadness with which the more mature singers of two
generations later announce their questioning and their disillusionment.
The difference is just the difference between Shelley and Matthew
Arnold. There is a philosophic depth in this later music which the
former wholly lacked. Arnold speaks for his time when he announces
himself as standing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to
be born. A profound disillusionment expressed itself in great ranges of
later nineteenth century literature and confirmed the more sensitive and
despairing in a positive pessimism, strangely contrasted to the
self-assertive temper of the science and industry of the period. It
would need a pretty careful analysis to follow all this to its roots.
Something of it no doubt was due to the inability of poet and
philosopher to reconcile their new understanding of life and the
universe with the old religious forms but more of it was likely due to
some deep exhaustion of spiritual force, an exhaustion which has from
time to time marked transitional periods in the development of cultures
and civilizations.

There have always been twilight zones in history, times in which the
force of the old had spent itself and nothing new had come to take its
place. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing through
a twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through the
more than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorian
period darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our own
time. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the more
sensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of a
coming shadow had fallen first of all upon them, and beyond debate, not
a little of the doubt which has been so marked a feature of the last two
generations in literature generally, and in the attitude of a great
number of people toward religion, has been due to just this.

_The Hunger of the Soul and the Need for Faith Persist_

And yet, since religion is so inexting