The transition from Judaism to Christianity was not facile. It was not upon smooth water nor under a balmy sky. There was involved in it nearly every one of those elements of resistance and of contention which have accompanied growth from that day to this. As human life begins in throes and labor-pain, so every successive step of development in the individual is by the throes of self denial. It would seem almost as though suffering and sorrow were godmothers to every step upward in this world. No enfranchisement among men in citizenship, no liberty of men in moral things, no largeness in organization toward liberty, and no clearer light in matters of religious faith and religious duty have taken place, except through contentions, resistances—largely the resistance of good men; good in other things, not wise in that.

We are living in a time when we know that there is a great change going on. I do not allude to the long past tendencies in Germany, and the lapse of faith in France, but to the tendencies in our own mother land, in England, where, if there is a learned conservatism in the world, it abides.