this: on the contrary, they appeal to Jesus or Isa as their highest authority, they constantly use the language of the New Testament, and refer to the legends of the Old. If Christianity and Mohammedanism are ever to join hands in carrying out the high objects at which they are both aiming, Sufiism would be the common ground on which they could best meet each other, understand each other, and help each other.

LECTURE XII.

THE LOGOS.

Religion a Bridge between the Visible and Invisible.

IT may be truly said that the founders of the religions of the world have all been bridgebuilders. As soon as the existence of a Beyond, of a Heaven above the earth, of Powers above us and beneath us had been recognised, a great gulf seemed to be fixed between what was called by various names, the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual, the phenomenal and noumenal, or best of all, the visible and invisible world (óparós and ȧvóparos), and it was the chief object of religion to unite these two worlds again, whether by the arches of hope and fear, or by the iron chains of logical syllogisms 1.

1 A writer in the Christian Register, July 16, 1891, p. 461, expresses the same thoughts when he says: 'At the bottom of all religions is man's instinct of his relationship with the Infinite; and this will not be weakened, but on the contrary will be made stronger and firmer from age to age, as the survey of the career of the race gives man wider and wider experience, and enables him more and more clearly to interpret his history, and see it as a consistent whole, under the rule of invariable law. Religion therefore is something above or beyond any form in which it has ever appeared, and Christianity is a distinctive, yet natural step in an unfolding process, not a supernatural form projected into human life from without, and not yet absolute religion.'

This problem of uniting the invisible and the visible worlds presented itself under three principal aspects. The first was the problem of creation, or how the invisible Primal Cause could ever come in contact with visible matter and impart to it form and meaning. The second problem was the relation between God and the individual soul. The third problem was the return of the soul from the visible to the invisible world, from the prison of its mortal body to the freedom of a heavenly paradise. It is this third problem which has chiefly occupied us in the present course of lectures, but it is difficult to separate it altogether from the first and the second. The individual soul as dwelling in a material body forms part of the created world, and the question of the return of the soul to God is therefore closely connected with that of its creation by, or its emanation from God.

We saw while treating of the last problem and examining the solutions which it had received that most of the religions and philosophies of the ancient world were satisfied with the idea of the individual soul approaching nearer and nearer to God and retaining its terrestrial individuality face to face with an objective deity. There was one religion only, or one religious philosophy, that of the Vedânta, which, resting on the firm conviction that the human soul could never have been separate from the Divine Soul, looked upon a return or an approach of the soul to God as a metaphor only, while it placed the highest happiness of the soul in the discovery and recovery of its true nature as from eternity to eternity one with God. This contrast was most clearly shown in

Sufiism as compared with Vedântism. The Sufi with all his burning love of God conceives the soul as soaring upward, as longing like a lover for a nearer and nearer approach to God, and as lost at last in ecstatic raptures when enjoying the beatific vision. The Vedantist on the contrary, after having once convinced himself by rigorous logic, that there can be but one Divine Substance, which he calls the Self or Âtman, and that his human self cannot be anything different in its essence from the true and universal Self, from that which was and is and is to be, all in all, is satisfied with having by means of rigorous reasoning recovered his true self in the highest Self, and thus having found rest in Brahman. He knows no raptures, no passionate love for the Deity, nor does he wait for death to deliver his soul from its bodily prison, but he trusts to knowledge, the highest knowledge, as strong enough to deliver his soul from all nescience and illusion even in this life. It is true that some of the Sufis also come sometimes very near to this point, as when Jellâl eddîn says: The "I am He" is a deep mystic saying, expressing oneness with the Light, not mere incarnation.' Still in general the oneness which is the highest good of the Sufi, is union of two, not the denial of the possibility of real separation.

There are religions in which there seems to be no place at all either for an approach of the individual soul to God, or for its finding itself again in God. Buddhism, in its original form, knows of no objective Deity, of nothing to which the subjective soul could approach or with which it could be united. If we can speak of Deity at all in Buddhism, it would reside in the Buddha, that is in the awakened soul,

conscious of its true eternal nature, and enlightened by self-knowledge. But that self-knowledge was no longer the Vedanta knowledge of the Átman, or, if it was so originally, it had ceased to be so in that Buddhism which is represented to us in the sacred books of that religion.

In Judaism, on the contrary, the concept of the Deity is so strongly marked, so objective, so majestic, and so transcendent, that an approach to or a union with Jehovah would have been considered almost as an insult to Deity. There seem to be some reminiscences in the Old Testament of an earlier belief in a closer relationship between God and man, but they never point to a philosophical belief in the original oneness of the Divine and the human soul, nor could they possibly have led on to the concept of the Word as the Son of God. In the mythological religions of classical antiquity also there was little room for a union between human and divine nature. The character of the Greek and Roman gods is so intensely personal and dramatic that it excludes the possibility of a human soul becoming united with or absorbed in any one of them. The highest privilege that some specially favoured persons might have aspired to consisted in being admitted to the society of the Olympians. But here too we may catch some earlier reminiscences, for it is well known that some of the old poets and philosophers of Greece declared their belief that gods and men came from the same source, that the gods were immortal mortals, and men mortal immortals 1.

1 Heracliti Reliquiae, ed. Bywater, No. LVIII, 'Abávaro OvηToi, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεώτες.