They are settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out beforehand.

Such is the condition of the western world; and the western world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the east.

Thus opinions that the present age is forming for itself have a weight and a volume that opinions never before possessed.

They are the first beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion--an oecumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position.

The great question is, what shape finally will this dawning self-consciousness take?
Will it contain in it that negation of the supernatural which our positive assertions are at present supposed to necessitate?
If so, then it is not possible to conceive that this last development of humanity, this stupendous break from the past which is being accomplished by our understanding of it, will not be the sort of break which takes place when a man awakes from a dream, and finds all that he most prized vanished from him.