by students of the political and economic forces now working in
society, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in some
grave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral
authority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of the
church. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clear
that it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral and
religious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of
the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation.
In his _Recollections_, published three years ago, there is a final
paragraph which runs as follows: "A painful interrogatory, I must
confess, emerges. Has not your school held the civilized world,
both old and new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two long
generations past? Is it quite clear that their influence has been
so much more potent than the gospel of the various churches?
_Circumspice_. Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the field
of lies, as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed by
grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes,
and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, to a strange
Witch's Sabbath?"[11] This is his conclusion of the whole matter.

[Footnote 11: _Recollections_: II, p. 366 ff.]

But while the reasons for the failure are not far to seek, it is worth
while for the preacher to dwell on them for a moment. In strongly
centered souls like a Morley or an Erasmus, humanism produces a
stoical endurance and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, in
lesser spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lower
elements in human nature, the nature and extent of whose force it
either cloaks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuous
values which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily included