A good many people contemplate the future of the world with an alarmed feeling that vast material progress and enlarged knowledge of the visible and tangible universe are likely to be accompanied by intellectual developments dangerous to the religious spirit in mankind. But to consider thus is to overlook the manifest trend of human thought at the present time. Of the two influences named, material progress and enlarged information about the universe, the former is probably much more directly liable to affect religious feeling adversely than the latter. Epochs of high civilisation and great luxury have often accompanied a general tendency to scepticism, and these conditions are also perhaps (and for the same reasons) not highly favourable to the highest developments of poetry. There have been periods of scientific discovery which have coincided with the spread of irreligion. During the second half of the nineteenth century there was, for instance, no doubt a great increase of popular scepticism
175
