There is no such thing, of course, really as Irreligion--except by a purely conventional use of the word: the 'irreligious' man is one who has made up his mind either that there is no future world, or that it is so remote, as regards effectivity, as to have no bearing upon this.

And that is a religion--at least it is a dogmatic creed--as much as any other.
"The causes of this state of affairs I take to have been as follows: "Religion up to the Reformation had been a matter of authority, as it is again now; but the enormous development of various sciences and the wide spread of popular 'knowledge' had, in the first flush, distracted attention from that which is now, in all civilized countries, simply an axiom of thought, viz., that a Revelation of God must be embodied in a living authority safeguarded by God.

Further, at that time science and exact knowledge generally had not reached the point which they reached a little later--of corroborating in particular after particular, so far as they are capable of doing so, the Revelation of God known as Catholicism; and of knowing their limitations where they cannot.

Many sciences, at this time, had gone no further than to establish certain facts which appeared, to the very imperfectly educated persons of that period, to challenge and even to refute certain facts or deductions of Revelation.

Psychology, for example, strange as it now appears in our own day, actually seemed to afford other explanations of the Universe than that of Revelation.