“Now the real trouble at the bottom of all this was the state in which Religion found itself.  And you will find, gentlemen,” said the quasi-lecturer in parenthesis, glancing round the attentive faces, “that Religion always is and always has been at the root of every world-movement.  In fact it must be so.  The deepest instinct in man is his religion, that is, his attitude to eternal issues; and on that attitude must depend his relation to temporal things.  This is so, largely, even in the case of the individual; it must therefore be infinitely more so in large bodies or nations; since every crowd is moved by principles that are the least common multiple of the principles of the units which compose it.  Of course this is universally recognized now; but it was not always so.  There was a time, particularly at this period of which I am now speaking, when men attempted to treat Religion as if it were one department of life, instead of being the whole foundation of every and all life.  To treat it so is, of course, to proclaim oneself as fundamentally irreligious—­and, indeed, very ignorant and uneducated.

“To resume, however: 

“Religion at this period was at a very strange crisis.  That it could possibly be treated in the way I have mentioned shows how very deeply irreligion had spread.  There is no such thing, of course, really as Irreligion—­except by a purely conventional use of the word:  the ‘irreligious’ man is one who has made up his mind either that there is no future world, or that it is so remote, as regards effectivity, as to have no bearing upon this.  And that is a religion—­at least it is a dogmatic creed—­as much as any other.

“The causes of this state of affairs I take to have been as follows: 

“Religion up to the Reformation had been a matter of authority, as it is again now; but the enormous development of various sciences and the wide spread of popular ‘knowledge’ had, in the first flush, distracted attention from that which is now, in all civilized countries, simply an axiom of thought, viz., that a Revelation of God must be embodied in a living authority safeguarded by God.  Further, at that time science and exact knowledge generally had not reached the point which they reached a little later—­of corroborating in particular after particular, so far as they are capable of doing so, the Revelation of God known as Catholicism; and of knowing their limitations where they cannot.  Many sciences, at this time, had gone no further than to establish certain facts which appeared, to the very imperfectly educated persons of that period, to challenge and even to refute certain facts or deductions of Revelation.  Psychology, for example, strange as it now appears in our own day, actually seemed to afford other explanations of the Universe than that of Revelation. (We will discuss details presently.) Social Science, at that time, too, moved in the direction of Democracy and even Socialism.  I know it appears