The waves came in one after another, the sea-gulls cried together
after their kind, the wind rustled among the dried canes upon the
sandbanks, and there came a voice from heaven saying, "Let My grace
be sufficient for thee." Whereon, failing of the thing itself, he
stole the word and strove to crush its meaning to the measure of his
own limitations. But the true grace, with her groves and high
places, and troups of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and
singing of love and youth and wine--the true grace he drove out into
the wilderness--high up, it may be, into Piora, and into such-like
places. Happy they who harboured her in her ill report.

It is common to hear men wonder what new faith will be adopted by
mankind if disbelief in the Christian religion should become general.
They seem to expect that some new theological or quasi-theological
system will arise, which, mutatis mutandis, shall be Christianity
over again. It is a frequent reproach against those who maintain
that the supernatural element of Christianity is without foundation,
that they bring forward no such system of their own. They pull down
but cannot build. We sometimes hear even those who have come to the
same conclusions as the destroyers say, that having nothing new to
set up, they will not attack the old. But how can people set up a
new superstition, knowing it to be a superstition? Without faith in
their own platform, a faith as intense as that manifested by the
early Christians, how can they preach? A new superstition will come,
but it is in the very essence of things that its apostles should have
no suspicion of its real nature; that they should no more recognise
the common element between the new and the old than the early
Christians recognised it between their faith and Paganism. If they
did, they would be paralysed. Others say that the new fabric may be
seen rising on every side, and that the coming religion is science.