spiritual pride and ambition as the old priest of the Church, and it
is quite as well for him that he should be on his guard against these
scarlet and high-crested sins.

The success of Reviews, of which our own was the first English type,
marks a very considerable revolution in the intellectual habits of the
time. They have brought abstract discussion from the library down to
the parlour, and from the serious student down to the first man in
the street. We have passed through a perfect cyclone of religious
polemics. The popularity of such Reviews means that really large
audiences, _le gros public_, are eagerly interested In the radical
discussion of propositions which twenty years ago were only publicly
maintained, and then in their crudest, least true, and most repulsive
form, in obscure debating societies and little secularist clubs.
Everybody, male or female, who reads anything serious at all, now
reads a dozen essays a year to show, with infinite varieties of
approach and of demonstration, that we can never know whether there be
a Supreme Being or not, whether the soul survives the body, or whether
mind is more and other than a mere function of matter. No article
that has appeared in any periodical for a generation back excited so
profound a sensation as Mr. Huxley's memorable paper On the Physical
Basis of Life, published in this Review in February 1869. It created
just the same kind of stir that, in a political epoch, was made by
such a pamphlet as the _Conduct of the Allies_ or the _Reflections on
the French Revolution_. This excitement was a sign that controversies
which had hitherto been confined to books and treatises were now to be
admitted to popular periodicals, and that the common man of the world
would now listen and have an opinion of his own on the bases of
belief, just as he listens and judges in politics or art, or letters.
The clergy no longer have the pulpit to themselves, for the new
Reviews became more powerful pulpits, in which heretics were at least
as welcome as orthodox. Speculation has become entirely democratised.
This is a tremendous change to have come about in little more than a
dozen years. How far it goes, let us not be too sure. It is no new
discovery that what looks like complete tolerance may be in reality
only complete indifference. Intellectual fairness is often only
another name for indolence and inconclusiveness of mind, just as love
of truth is sometimes a fine phrase for tempe