362 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



the religious and artistic senses, it still remains a fact 

 that the possessors of the former are constantly becoming 

 rarer, while the sharers in the artistic emotions and per- 

 ceptions are constantly becoming more numerous with 

 the diffusion of a liberal culture. Could it be said that 

 the religious sense once existed more universally and 

 more intensely because it was more needed, but that now 

 it has fallen into general disuse, and in most cases is a 

 merely impotent organ? That the sense once existed, 

 because in the early dismal days of Christianity, when 

 the saints and martyrs were driven into deserts and 

 caves, under the scourge of persecution, added to their 

 conviction of the vanity of life, the felt presence of God 

 as a support was an imperative need; but that in 

 modern days, the need being less pressing, the religious 

 sense or feeling is feebler, amounting in most to no more 

 than a kind of rudimentary spiritual organ, which only 

 testifies to the former different spiritual wants and 

 environment ? 



It might be said, and possibly with truth ; but what 

 we know, and what concerns us here to note as fact, is 

 that those who lay claim to a special organ of com- 

 munion with a personal Deity are becoming rarer ; that 

 when the modern representatives of Plotinus or St. 

 Bernard attempt, though less confidently than their pro- 

 totypes, to describe their mode of apprehension of the 

 Divine Personality, and their manner of intercourse with 

 Him, they are for the most part above the logical under- 

 standing to which their experience is untranslatable, 

 and that modern psychology, which tries to explain the 

 artistic and moral perceptions, has reserved no place or 

 name for the so-called religious intuitions, or for the 

 religious sense. 



7. For the most part, we have said, that the be- 



