of action, the theories of human life which in one area prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have anticipated them.  One, we may suppose, holds some “greatest nobleness principle,” the other some “greatest happiness principle;” and then their very systems of axioms will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices, will be in perpetual and endless contradiction.  Our minds take shape from our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own meaning, but submit to many readings, according to the power of eye which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us, leads to many singular contradictions.  A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to regard mankind as growing every day in a more and more advantageous position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it is easier for him to “save his soul” in the nineteenth century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the said soul is necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for an answer.  There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had “lived in the days of the fathers,” if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that, in old Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of general nobleness, in which we should have been less troubled with the little feelings which cling about us now.  At any rate, it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge.  At such times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an ennobling influence on mankind.  Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely lost.  The historical monuments of their effects are at least indestructible; and, when the spirit which gave them birth reappears, their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the poorer nature which is in us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness.  The once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formula whether of mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or “reward and punishment,” are contrived ever so as to escape making over high demands on men.  Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of motives.  So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from all higher aspirations we are lowered down to the love of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle over again.  The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job’s case, a cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its obligations must again be opened.