the fair flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new
spirit of the time. All other moods save this had been exhausted:
the unceasing criticism, the boundless curiosity in the ways and
thoughts of man, which was the mood of the ancient Greek, to whom
these things were not so much a means, as an end, was gone past
recovery; nor had there been really any shadow of it in the so-called
science of the nineteenth century, which, as you must know, was in
the main an appendage to the commercial system; nay, not seldom an
appendage to the police of that system. In spite of appearances, it
was limited and cowardly, because it did not really believe in
itself. It was the outcome, as it was the sole relief, of the
unhappiness of the period which made life so bitter even to the rich,
and which, as you may see with your bodily eyes, the great change has
swept away. More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit
of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the life of the next world was
such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the
earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the
ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it.

"But that also, with its assured belief in heaven and hell as two
countries in which to live, has gone, and now we do, both in word and
in deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and as
it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of
days which our own mere individual experience wins for us: and
consequently we are happy. Do you wonder at it? In times past,
indeed, men were told to love their kind, to believe in the religion
of humanity, and so forth. But look you, just in the degree that a
man had elevation of mind and refinement enough to be able to value
this idea, was he repelled by the obvious aspect of the individuals
composing the mass which he was to worship; and he could only evade