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 talent to do anything else
but live by them. It is amongst these that we must look to see what
such principles really result in; and of these we must choose not those
who would welcome license, but those who long passionately to live by
law. It is the condition of such men that I have been just describing.
Its characteristics are vain self-reproach, joyless commendation, weary
struggle, listless success, general indifference, and the prospect that
if matters are going thus badly with them, they will go even worse with
their children.

Such a spectacle certainly is not one that has much promise for the
optimist; and the more we consider it, the more sad and ominous will it
appear to us. Indeed, when the present age shall realise its own
condition truly, the dejection of which it is slowly growing conscious
may perhaps give way to despair. This condition, however, is so
portentous that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that it is what it
seems to be, and that it is not a dream. But the more steadily we look
at it, the more real will its appalling features appear to us. We are
literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is
new to the experience of humanity; and though the moral dejection we