progress for the race collectively, it must be accomplished in a cycle vast as those of the geological eras;—­a deposit of a millionth of an inch of knowledge and virtue over the whole race in fifty million years or so!  Mr. Newman is pleased to say, “Some nations sink, while others rise; but the lower and higher levels are both generally ascending.”  Has this level for the whole race been raised perceptibly within the memory of so-called history?

Observe; I am not denying that the notion may be true:  I am literally the sceptic I profess to be:  I know not—­apart from special information from a superhuman source—­whether it be true or false.  I am only venturing to laugh at men, who, denying any such information, affect to speak with any confidence on the solution of this prodigious problem, the data for solving which I contend we have not:  while those we have, apart from the direct assurance of supposed inspiration, more plausibly point to an opposite conclusion.  The conclusion which would more naturally suggest itself from the history of the past would be that of perpetual advance and perpetual retrogression, contemporaneously going on in different portions of the race,—­ perpetual flux and reflux of the waves of knowledge and science an different shores; though, alas! as to “religion and virtue;” I fear that these, like the Mediterranean, are almost without their tides.  For a “progress” in the former,—­in the race collectively.—­far more plausible arguments can be adduced than for a progress in the latter; yet how much might be said that appears to militate even against that.  Think of the frequent and signal checks to civilization; its transference from seat to seat; the decay of races once celebrated for knowledge and art; the inundations of barbarism from time to time;—­these things alone might make a sober mind pause before he predicted for the entire race a certain progress even in art and science.  Experience would at most justify a philosopher in saying.  “Perhaps, yes; perhaps no.”  But the argument becomes incomparably more doubtful when we come to “religion,” and especially that particular form of it which such writers as Messrs. Parker and Newman believe will be preeminent and universal; towards which consummation it does not appear at present that the smallest conceivable advance has been made; since, with the exception of that infinitesimal party, of which they are among the chief, the immense majority of mankind persist in rejecting the sufficiency of the “internal” oracle, and are still found as strongly convinced as ever both of the possibility and necessity of an “external” revelation, and that, in some shape or other, it has been given!  Nay, the facts, so far as we have any, seem all the other way; for no sooner had men been put approximately in possession of the pure “spiritual truth,” which both Mr. Newman and Mr. Parker suppose to be characteristic in larger measure of Judaism and Christianity than of any other religion, than they busily began