assert that experiment in the direction I have suggested will prove to
our consciousness that the moral or spiritual quality of the original
invading force is a pure one, and that the degree of its pollution in the
human frame is the effect of inherited and other organic conditions; and
the question which presents itself to the experimentalist is, whether by
an effort of the will this same force may not be evoked to change and
purify those conditions. Indeed the very effort is in itself an
invocation, and if made unflinchingly, will not fail to meet with a
response. Much that has heretofore been to earnest seekers unknowable
will become knowable, and a love, Mr Coldwaite, higher, if that be
possible, than the love of humanity, yet correlative with and inseparable
from it, will be found pressing with an irresistible potency into those
vacant spaces of the human heart, which have from all time yearned for a
closer contact with the Great Source of all love and of all force. It is
in this attempt to sever the love of humanity from its Author, that the
Positivist philosophy has failed: it is the worship of a husk without the
kernel, of a body without the soul; and hence it will never satisfy the
human aspiration. That aspiration is ever the same; it needs, if you
will allow me to say so, Lady Fritterly, no new religion to satisfy its
demands. If the world is of late beginning to feel dissatisfied with
Christianity, it is not because the moral standard which that religion
proposes is not sufficiently lofty for its requirements, but because,
after eighteen hundred years of effort, its professors have altogether
failed to reach that standard. Christianity seems a failure because
Christians have failed--have failed to understand its application to
everyday life, have failed to embody it in practice, and have sought an
escape from the apparent impossibility of doing so, by smothering it with
dogmas, and diverting its scope from this world to the next. It will be
time to look for a new religion, when we have succeeded in the literal
application of the ethics of the one we have got to the social and