When once the age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the other--they will be either impotent or omnipotent.

Their public exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast.

But the world feels uneasily that the import of it will be very different from what we are assured it is.

One English writer, indeed, on the positive side, has already seen clearly what the movement really means, whose continuance and whose consummation he declares to us to be a necessity.

'_Never_,' he says, '_in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation._'[32] The question I shall now proceed to is the exact causes of this movement, and the chances and the powers that the human race has of resisting it.
FOOTNOTES: [29] '_For my own part, I do not for one moment admit that morality is not strong enough to hold its own._'-- Prof.Huxley, _Nineteenth Century_, May, 1877.
[30] These words may no doubt be easily pressed into a sense which Catholics would repudiate.