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The second reason why this book may have a special interest is that it may serve as a reminder to my contemporaries of our stirring thoughts and experiences in the seventies and eighties. How interesting this period was it is difficult to show in a few lines. In pure literature, books of value simply poured from the press. In the closing year, 1889, “One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward” died on the day that his last book, Asolando, was published, leaving Tennyson, an old man of eighty, the sole survivor of the poets of a great period. At almost the same moment “Crossing the Bar” was published.

Apart from literature, the seventies and eighties were an eventful period in science and religion. Darwinism was still causing its tremendous upheaval, and the supposed conflict between religion and science exercised an enormous effect on the minds of men. Evolution had explained so much of the processes in the history of life, that the majority of thinkers at that time imagined that no room was left for the super-natural. Science was supposed to have given a death-blow to religion, and the greatest wave of materialism ever known in the history of the world swept over England and Europe. It is strange how many great thinkers missed what now appears so obvious a fact, that causality still stood behind all law, and that Darwin, like Newton, had merely helped to show the method by which the universe is governed. (It seems to me that James Martineau stood supreme at that time as a man of genius who saw clearly the inherent defect of the whole materialist movement.)