As in Johnson's day, every
young writer imitated as well as he could the ponderous diction and
everlasting antitheses of the great dictator as in Byron's day, there
were thousands to whom the world 'was a blank' at twenty or thereabouts,
and of whose dark imaginings,' as Macaulay says, the waste was
prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists', mystics
and sceptics to whom everything is a 'sham,' an 'unreality'; Who tell
us that the world stands in need of a great 'prophet,' a seer,' a 'true
prophet', a large soul,' a god-like soul,'*--who shall dive into 'the
depths of the human consciousness,' and whose 'utterances' shall
rouse the human mind from the 'cheats and frauds' which have hitherto
everywhere practised on its simplicity. The tell us, in relation to
philosophy, religion, and especially in relation to Christianity,
that all that has been believed by mankind has been believed only on
'empirical' grounds; and that the old answers to difficulties will do
no longer. They shake their sage heads at such men as Clarke, Paley,
Butler, and declare that such arguments as theirs will not satisfy
them.,--We are glad to admit that all this vague pretension is now
but rarely displayed with the scurrilous spirit of that elder unbelief
against which the long series of British apologists for Christianity
arose between 1700 and 1750; But there is often in it an arrogance
as real, though not in so offensive a form.
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