the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into
that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always
heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most
blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.

In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least
of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling. I know
well that my sketch is inadequate and partial: I have every reason
to believe, from the criticisms which I have received since its
first publication, that it is, as far as it goes, correct. I put it
as a problem. It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more
than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be
found. I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no
right to start doubts without answering them. I can only answer,--
Would that I had started them! would that I was not seeing them
daily around me, under some form or other, in just the very hearts
for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed and
healthy faith. To the young, this book can do no harm; for it will
put into their minds little but what is there already. To the
elder, it may do good; for it may teach some of them, as I earnestly
hope, something of the real, but too often utterly unsuspected,
state of their own children's minds; something of the reasons of
that calamitous estrangement between themselves and those who will
succeed them, which is often too painful and oppressive to be
confessed to their own hearts! Whatever amount of obloquy this book
may bring upon me, I shall think that a light price to pay, if by it
I shall have helped, even in a single case, to 'turn the hearts of
the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the
parents, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come,'--as
come it surely will, if we persist much longer in substituting