If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings[109] of a worn-out superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible on which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he can build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are tell............