when he was excited. "Do you not see how existence becomes more difficult with each year as it passes? New discoveries and experiences are springing up every hour, and doubts and inquiry are burrowing under, and undermining the whole fabric. Revered and well grounded truths are falling to the ground, and those who are too timid to advance with the times, are gathering confusedly about the rotten framework, supporting, preserving, and terrified, denouncing youth, and predicting the destruction of society. Your grandfather stood on the very summit of the cultivation of his day, living as he did in a state of society which was peaceful and conscious of its security, with aristocratic intelligence above and aristocratic ignorance below. Your father, on the other hand, had grown to manhood when the movement reached us, and he had already a fixed understanding as to his own line in life, when the new ideas came streaming in upon him. Then followed the long and painful struggle. But we who are a generation younger, and who enter upon life from school, with the old maxims only half rooted in our minds, feel the whole fabric tottering. Doubt and uncertainty reign on every side, and we find ourselves now in a state of eager expectation, and now plunged in gloomy apprehension. Wheresoever we place our foot, the ground gives way beneath us, and if we wish to sit down and rest awhile, the chair is drawn from under us by some invisible hand. Thus are we whirled to and fro in a struggle for which we were never prepared, and in which numbers of us miserably perish. Fathers scold
