gains the victory. I venture to submit that the new forms now at work in
the world are not forms that will do their work by halves. When once the
age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the
other--they will be either impotent or omnipotent. Their public
exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and
more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast. But the world
feels uneasily that the import of it will be very different from what we
are assured it is. One English writer, indeed, on the positive side, has
already seen clearly what the movement really means, whose continuance
and whose consummation he declares to us to be a necessity. '_Never_,'
he says, '_in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the
race as that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge,
black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most
cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our
highest life in mindless desolation._'[32]

The question I shall now proceed to is the exact causes of this
movement, and the chances and the powers that the human race has of
resisting it.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] '_For my own part, I do not for one moment admit that morality is
not strong enough to hold its own._'--Prof. Huxley, _Nineteenth
Century_, May, 1877.

[30] These words may no doubt be easily pressed into a sense which
Catholics would repudiate. But if not pressed unduly, they represent
what will, I believe, be admitted to be a fact.