Such lives as these are all of them really in a state of moral consumption.  The disease in its earlier stage is a very subtle one; and it may not be generally fatal for years, or even for generations.  But it is a disease that can be transmitted from parent to child; and its progress is none the less sure because it is slow; nor is it less fatal and painful because it may often give a new beauty to the complexion.  On various constitutions it takes hold in various ways, and its presence is first detected by the sufferer under various trials, and betrayed to the observer by various symptoms.  What I have just been describing is the action that is at the root of it; but with the individual it does not always take that form.  Often indeed it does; but oftener still perhaps it is discovered not in the helpless yet reluctant yielding to vice, but in the sadness and the despondency with which virtue is practised—­in the dull leaden hours of blank endurance or of difficult endeavour; or in the little satisfaction that, when the struggle has ceased, the reward of struggle brings with it.

An earlier, and perhaps more general symptom still, is one that is not personal.  It consists not in the way in which men regard themselves, but in the way in which they regard others.  In their own case, their habitual desire of right, and their habitual aversion to wrong, may have been enough to keep them from any open breach with conscience, or from putting it to an open shame.  But its precarious position is revealed to them when they turn to others.  Sin from which they recoil themselves they see committed in the life around them, and they find that it cannot excite the horror or disapproval, which from its supposed nature it should.  They find themselves powerless to pass any general judgment, or to extend the law they live by to any beyond themselves.  The whole prospect that environs them has become morally colourless; and they discern in their attitude towards the world without, what it must one day come to be towards the world within.  A state of mind like this is no dream.  It is a malady of the modern world—­a malady of our own generation, which can escape no eyes that will look for it.  It is betraying itself every moment around us, in conversation, in literature, and in legislation.

Such, then, is the condition of that large and increasing class on which modern thought is beginning to do its work.  Its work must be looked for here, and not in narrower quarters; not amongst professors and lecturers, but amongst the busy crowd about us; not on the platforms of institutions, or in the lay sermons of specialists, but amongst politicians, artists, sportsmen, men of business, lovers—­in ’the tides of life, and in the storm of action’—­amongst men who have their own way to force or choose in the world, and their daily balance to strike between self-denial and pleasure—­on whom the positive principles have been forced as true, and who have no time or