But the sparkle dies, and the reflection comes again.

And there are many about us, though they never confess their pain, and perhaps themselves hardly like to acknowledge it, whose hearts are aching for the religion that they can no longer believe in.

Their lonely hours, between the intervals of gaiety, are passed with barren and sombre thoughts; and a cry rises to their lips but never passes them.
Amongst such a class it is somehow startling to find the most unlikely people at times placing themselves.

Professor Clifford, for instance, who of all our present positivists is most uproarious in his optimism, has yet admitted that the religion he invites us to trample on is, under certain forms, an ennobling and sustaining thing; and for such theism as that of Charles Kingsley's he has expressed his deepest reverence.
Again, there is Professor Huxley.

He denies with the most dogmatic and unbending severity any right to man to any supernatural faith; and he '_will not for a moment admit_' that our higher life will suffer in consequence.[29] And yet '_the lover of moral beauty_,' he says wistfully, '_struggling through a world of sorrow and sin, is surely as much the stronger for believing that sooner or later a vision of perfect peace and goodness will burst upon him, as the toiler up a mountain for the belief that beyond crag and snow lie home and rest_.' And he adds, as we have seen already, that could a faith like what he here indicates be placed upon a firm basis, mankind would cling to it as '_tenaciously as ever a drowning sailor did to a hen-coop_.' But all this wide-spread and increasing feeling is felt at present to be of no avail.