The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for 1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus. Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed, however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.' The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which had any sincerity remaining in it.