To me they seem--with a small sprinkling of those noble and cheering exceptions to popular error which are to be found in every age of Christ's church--to be losing most fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of Christianity, and to be, for that very reason, clinging all the more convulsively--and who can blame them ?--to the outward letter of it, whether High Church or Evangelical; unconscious, all the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.
In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling.

I know well that my sketch is inadequate and partial: I have every reason to believe, from the criticisms which I have received since its first publication, that it is, as far as it goes, correct.

I put it as a problem.

It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be found.

I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no right to start doubts without answering them.