reached. This was the predominant impulse which ancient life yielded to modern life, and this the force that built the new out of the ruins of the old. The history of theism is inseparable from that of civilization, and increasingly as the ages advanced.

In the middle Roman development a very general, sagacious and searching scepticism prevailed. It served rather to break down effete systems and clear the way for a purer theism, than to resist its progress. The dominant thought of Christianity became the constructive agency of society amid the dissolving mists of mythology. Again, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Christianity had become so hidden beneath the debris of barbarism that its spiritual life seemed about to be smothered.

Scepticism and fanaticism, immorality and piety, grew rankly side by side. The purer life of the past was deeply buried under this alluvial drift. Yet concealed germs here and there began to push, and took on the new vigor of the Reformation. The scepticism of our own time, in harmony with this historic development, can only issue in a still further purification and triumph of theism. Any other result would not be continuation, but overthrow.

(4) Akin with this continuity of growth has been its increasing generality. In the Roman period and earlier, civilization and power tended to gather into one race or one nation or if separated into two nations, the equilibrium was unstable. Now there are many relatively equal nations, many types of civilization, and all are quietly held in one system. This separation of enlightened nations into independent