of the Cross, and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified.  It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—­as agnostic countries.  But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never known Christianity.

What will be in the future the dominant spiritual ideas of those nations which hitherto have been known as Christian, is scarcely a question of the twentieth century.  Whatever variations of faith, in direction or in degree, the close of that century may show, it is not probable that so short a period will reveal the full change of standards and of practice which necessarily must follow ultimately upon a radical change of belief.  That the impress of Christianity will remain throughout the coming century is reasonably as certain as that it took centuries of nominal faith to lift Christian standards and practice even to the point they now have reached.  Decline, as well as rise, must be gradual; and gradual likewise, granting the utmost possible spread of Christian beliefs among them, will be the approximation of the Eastern nations, as nations, to the principles which powerfully modify, though they cannot control wholly even now, the merely natural impulses of Western peoples.  And if, as many now say, faith has departed from among ourselves, and still more will depart in the coming years; if we have no higher sanction to propose for self-restraint and righteousness than enlightened self-interest and the absurdity of war, war—­violence—­will be absurd just so long as the balance of interest is on that side, and no longer.  Those who want will take, if they can, not merely from motives of high policy and as legal opportunity offers, but for the simple reasons that they have not, that they desire, and that they are able.  The European world has known that stage already; it has escaped from it only partially by the gradual hallowing of public opinion and its growing weight in the political scale.  The Eastern world knows not the same motives, but it is rapidly appreciating the material advantages and the political traditions which have united to confer power upon the West; and with the appreciation desire has arisen.

Coincident with the long pause which the French Revolution imposed upon the process of external colonial expansion which was so marked a feature of the eighteenth century, there occurred another singular manifestation of national energies, in the creation of the great standing armies of modern days, themselves the outcome of the levee en masse, and of the general conscription, which the Revolution bequeathed to us along with its expositions of the Rights of Man.  Beginning with the birth of the century, perfected during its continuance, its close finds them in full maturity and power, with