392 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



their sway over a larger mass of mankind. The senti- 

 ments social and political, which have no reference to 

 self or personal interests, but to race, country, class, or 

 kind, are far more widely diffused, and have shown 

 themselves in more pronounced and potent form in 

 modern times, and certainly not least strong during the 

 past quarter of a century. History, since the epoch of 

 the French Revolution up to our own day, gives abun- 

 dant proof of the power of mere ideas over men, apart 

 from every question of their origin or even legitimacy. 

 Men have struggled for ideas as passionately in the nine- 

 teenth century as in the sixteenth or in the age of the 

 Crusades, save only that the ideas have changed their 

 form and the colour of their attractions, |)eing now 

 humanitarian rather than religious. Men have struggled 

 for them simply because they find them existing within 

 themselves, and because they feel their imperious sway 

 over them. They have not cared to analyze them with 

 the psychologist, feeling that they were meant for action 

 and not for analysis. And men will still continue, in 

 spite of disappointment in attaining the reality, in spite 

 even of their disappointment in the reality itself when 

 attained, to struggle again and again, with unwearied 

 faith and patience, for the ideal glorified in imagination. 

 And what an amount of effort, of blood, has been freely 

 spent during a whole century for ideas for liberty, for 

 unity, for brotherhood, for humanity, nay, for revolution 

 and anarchy itself, which have for some become strangely 

 consecrated as the conditions precedent of curing the 

 actual and obstinate evils of society ! 



And what enthusiasm, too, have not men of science, 

 of speculation, of learning, shown in our age for truth 

 for its own sake, apart from its apprehended good or 

 evil results to themselves ! What love of it ; what 



