this consciousness, and appeal to this in us. They could not be recognized as true but for their conformity to its experience. They could not be certified but by the trustworthiness of the present testimony of these organs or faculties which take cognizance of them. They could not even be apprehended at all but for the present activity of this living conscious Soul. Now when it is pretended that our Ideas of God, Duty, Immortality, are a mere traditional effluence from the Hebrews, the Bible, or the face of Jesus, all this is ignored; and in this the primary Source of Religious Knowledge and the Foundation of Religious Belief..

So plain are these truths, that it seems incredible they should ever be overlooked by reflecting persons: so inevitable, that the very writers we have quoted as insisting on the traditional nature of Religion and Morality can be quoted as positively in other passages upon the other side.

Whether the Bible is reliable, whether Jess was the express image of God, whether the Hebrew religion was a divine interpolation in the course of human history, are in part historical inquiries. But the question as to the origin of our religious knowledge lies behind these. It is not primarily a question of History, but of the laws and facts of present consciousness. And this preliminary inquiry, which underlies the whole dispute between a traditional and a spiritual religion, is utterly neglected in the prevailing theologies, whose tendencies are well indicated in the sentences I have quoted from their leading representatives.

We must go far down to strike the root of this matter. Our Spiritual Constitution is not a mere product of the Past. No single act or thought is so. Our conscious being, the force by which we think, feel, remember, judge, is a present force. The Past accounts for nothing beyond itself. For the continuance of our intelligence into the Present, it was requisite that power should be added to the Past. Even if I were at this moment precisely the same as I was in that immediately preceding it, I should be something more than the mere passive product of this last. How happens it that I did not end with this? The bare fact of my continuance proves an active principle in the Present as such. The laws of my nature are always the same. Yet it would be absurd to pretend that their activity to-day was a mere effect of their activity yesterday. Life is no such mere consequence of former life. It is a permanent fact; and whether in past or present time, it is explicable only as the product of a Force above itself, unceasingly active, unceasingly present. Even if we remained always the same, therefore, our Past would not explain our Present. But we am not the same. Somewhat

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is incessantly added, since every instant sees changes, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual; sees, in a word, growth. The Past cannot account for these changes. It cannot by its own force produce what is different from itself, still less, what is greater than itself. Development cannot mean that a less thing can evolve a greater out of its own resources. It might as well be said that the smaller of two circles could contain the larger. Development means that the less thing serves as condition and ground work for the influx of new and greater force, whereby it is enabled to expand in the direction of its natural tendencies. The Materialist imagines that the bodily organization creates the soul; that brain secretes thought out of its own substance; that divine poems and immortal discoveries are meat and drink transmuted by chemical laws: in short, that there is an inherent capacity in the less to produce the greater. We at least avoid this manifest absurdity, when we affirm on the other hand, that brain and food are but the means by which the higher Spiritual Nature can act upon the physical world to the production of those higher results, out of its own ampler force.

Now it is certainly not a whit more irrational to suppose that a phosphate can of its own force grow into a human brain, or a dead fowl develop itself into a living epic, than to conceive that the Past will explain the phenomenon of intellectual or spiritual growth. If a superior thing seems to follow out of an inferior, it can only be through the incoming of a capacity greater than either.

We say a tree springs from a seed. But we do not mean that the Of course the sun, the earth, the air, little seed made the great tree. all brought their tributes. The tree is the product of Nature, which s greater than it, not of the seed, which is in all respects less. And so our Present, which is always more than the Past, is not the passive result of the past, but the effect of larger living forces.

Our Being is the present activity of Eternal Laws; not resulting from the Past, but from Power which resides at every point of time and makes Past and Present alike. Our consciousness is the present activity of our Being, and with whatever materials our past experiences may supply it, they do not in any sense create it.

In part, indeed, we are historical products. Each event grows from The whole Past, in mass and in a preceding, as effect from cause. detail, is essential to the explanation of every moment's thought and act. There is no gulf between to-day and yesterday. And so closely woven is the web of human history, that a higher Intelligence might unroll from a single act our whole Past, as naturalists make a flower or a fossil fragment tell the story of a life whereof it is the sole

remaining witness. But this covers only a part of the truth, and the most superficial part.. We cannot be merely historical products, since we are so made that we not only can, but do and must judge our Past by the standard of the Present. If the Present were but History in sequel, a passive product of the Past, how could this, its creator, be subject to its measurements and criticisms? Can the clay vessel take the potter to task? How could we say of deeds and experiences gone by, this was great and that little? How could we judge, as we do, not by what we have been, but by what we are! We do so simply because the present instant is the point where sight resides, whence the light proceeds by which we see.

And though a higher Intelligence might unroll the history of our lives, simply by following effects back to causes, it would not prove the contrary of what we affirm; since it would be possible only through the recognition and full comprehension of instant perpetual forces, without which no antecedent influence could become what we commonly call a cause. To ignore these unfathomed Powers, which makes every event a fresh mystery, past our solution, is to leave out the life of our life.

We say then that the Past provides the material on which the Present must work; the conditions to which its fresh inspiration must be measurably subject; the soil into which its seeds must fall. No one, most assuredly, can withdraw from the historic chain. No one can break away from his Past. He must start to-day from the point to which it has brought him, and from no other. But does this exclude fresh intellectual invigorations? Rather are these essential to the very continuance of intellectual motion.

And if such be the conditions of Mental Life in general, they are eminently essential to that Spiritual Activity, which is Mind under its Religious Aspect.

Religion is the profoundest fact of our Nature. Relations to God, to Duty, to Immortality, are its vital, structural relations and the higher his development, the more fully does Man realize that in them he lives and moves and has his being. That Instant Force whereof we have been speaking, from which continuance, growth, sight, proceed, the Source of permanent law, and successive movement, and causal relation, and momentary spiritual supply, of past and present alike, to the Religious Nature, is God. His immediate and instant Sovereignty is identical with that of the Moral Law, whereto the correlative fact in Man is Duty. His dearest gift, equally immediate and instant, foundation of human joy, patience, faith, of growth, dignity, power, the crown and glory of our Nature, is Immortality.

Now it is these perpetual organic structural Realities, the consciousness whereof, if the prevailing statements of doctrine be true, is the mere result of Tradition! It is these Realities, whose constant force can no more be ignored than the fact of our existence, and which must have spoken in all men and all ages, somehow, to that human intelligence which is their creature, it is these that are affirmed to be practically known to us only through the Bible, "the Christ," the Hebrew race!

I know it will be replied that this is affirmed only of their highest forms; of the Idea of a personal, parental God; of a perfect Moral Order; of an Immortality which is Eternal Life. But this is to commit the error in the worst possible form and to the greatest possible extent. These Ideas are the utmost crown of religious conviction; to every believing soul a wonder and joy that bears witness of sweetest and closest union with the very Source of its being. Is it of these experiences especially that such intimate union is to be denied? If even these, which, as our best, should be most deeply rooted in our Nature, and which indeed show themselves so at one with its needs, so at home in it, that they alone can supremely bless and divinely inspire it, - if even these are in no vital and organic relation with it, but are the special bequest of a single race, a single book, a single official person, what place in Human Nature can belong to lower forms of belief in God, Duty, Immortality, which have shown comparatively little power to bring out its capacity of growth and joy? Nay -the Religious Sentiment or Faculty itself can be nothing but an alien and exotic in the soul, if its most cordial recognitions and intimacies therein are mere traditional echoes, having no root in the living Spiritual Constitution. But if the Religious Sentiment be not a permanent organic fact in Human Nature as such, to what can these traditions make appeal, by what can they be apprehended? And so the very foundations of Belief are swept away.

The limitation of Religious Ideas to a narrow, arbitrary, extra-natural origin in the Past in proportion to the breadth of their relation to Human Nature, and the grandeur of their power within it, is but a consequence of the notion that the Spiritual Constitution and Consciousness are the mere creation of the Past.

On the contrary, the highest forms of belief are precisely what prove these to be primarily a present Inspiration.

Let us state more distinctly what we may concerning the sources of spiritual Light.

Two views may be noted. The one is that Religious Belief is nowise related to the Past, but an entirely new creation, owing nothing

to antecedent persons or institutions. In order to receive Divine Influence, the soul must be swept clear of all prior influences, and a great gulf separate the Present from the Past: or rather there is no longer a Past. A few enthusiasts in almost every age have held, or seemed to hold, this extreme notion of inspiration. The Christian Church has, in general, held it to be true of Jesus, as the supernatural Founder of Christianity, and of him only. The other view is the exactly opposite one, that Religious Belief is in no sense due to the Present that its 'new birth' is but the result of a more vital energy effected by traditional Christianity. Here is properly no gulf between the Present and Past. There is properly no Present at all. God, the Divine Life, Spiritual Influence, are, so far as their direct access to the human soul is concerned, concentrated in a sacred locality in a remote age. If we look toward the Future, we are warned that we are turning the back upon all these. If we look up to the heavenly signs. of Present Duty and Promise, we are informed that this is to follow our fallible selves and not the Word of God. Instead of being swept clear of all prior influences, the soul must be swept clear of all present ones. There is no living God, only the reflected image of a God who appeared once for all in the face of Jesus. This is substantially the view of the churches concerning the origin of Religious Belief in all persons except of course Jesus himself, and his immediate disciples.

Here are the extremes. The one view denies God in the Present, the other denies him in the Past. Both fail of the truth that he belongs alike to Past, Present, and Future. For the soul is open to Him not through the channels of Traditions alone, not through its own present Spiritual Consciousness alone, but through both of these. But the far greater error of the two is that which denies God in the Present; for this strikes at the very source of Inspiration, the other only at certain methods and means thereof.

Our spiritual possessions are indeed the issue of our whole Past. "The Child is Father of the Man." We are all the offspring of a historical Providence, which weaves every strand of thought and act into the fabric of our life. There is no gulf between Past and Present. No new force can do more than modify the existing state of our characters, as our past lives have formed these, of our opinions as our education has made them. All Divine Influence must take its subject where he stands. It can have no other point of support, no other material to work in, than the actual status of the soul and the world. It must root itself in a soil prepared for it. The celestial gift that is to transfigure life falls not into a void, but into actual human conditions, as sunshine and rain bring vigor to waiting seeds. The Re