fail to be changed by the neighbourhood of irreligion. If it is
persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not
persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled. Believers and
unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these
days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life. They are
united by habits, by blood, and by friendship, and they are each obliged
continually to ignore or excuse what they hold to be the errors of the
other. In a state of things like this, it is plain that the conviction
of believers can have neither the fierce intensity that belongs to a
minority under persecution, nor the placid confidence that belongs to an
overwhelming majority. They can neither hate the unbelievers, for they
daily live in amity with them, nor despise altogether their judgment,
for the most eminent thinkers of the day belong to them. By such
conditions as these the strongest faith cannot fail to be affected. As
regards the individuals who retain it, it may not lose its firmness, but
it must lose something of its fervour; and as regards its own future
hold upon the human race, it is faith no longer, but is anxious doubt,
or, at best, a desperate trust. Dr. Newman has pointed out how even the
Pope has recognised in the sedate and ominous rise of our modern
earth-born positivism some phenomenon vaster and of a different nature
from the outburst of a petulant heresy; he seems to recognise it as a
belligerent rather than a rebel.[30] '_One thing_,' says Dr. Newman,
'_except by an almost miraculous interposition, cannot be; and that is a
return to the universal religious sentiment, the public opinion, of the
mediæval time. The Pope himself calls those centuries "the ages of
faith." Such endemic faith may certainly be decreed for some future
time; but_ _as far as we have the means of judging at present,
centuries must run out first._'[31]

In this last sentence is indicated the vast and universal question,