magical media-media which we are unable to connect with the motions of intelligence. The only way in which we can conceive a spiritual intelligence as conscious of any object is by conceiving that spiritual intelligence as operative in the act. To speak of a Revelation by one being to another concerning some sphere of truth, without, at the same time, conceiving the Revelation as consciously perceived, is absurd. In this consciousness on the part of the being who receives the communication we have given us a similarity of nature, in some manner, between that being and the one who makes the communication.

Here we have standing ground to combat the limited analysis of some psychologists and the confined view of some physicists. Thus, if man has, as we shall afterwards see to be actually the case, a nature in common with the Divine, the possibility of attaining a knowledge of supra-sensible things is guaranteed to him; and through his own nature, if not through the external world, a way is opened up to that which transcends everything usually included in mere nature, but need not therefore, as some suppose, transcend all experience. In this sense it is quite true, as some writers affirm, that there is no supernatural, properly so-called. If the basis of what is commonly called the supernatural is found to be within us, the supernatural is then merely a name for a sphere of experience which, in one respect at least, is on the same platform as the natural, although relating to a different order of truths. In this way the statement may be accepted that there is no supernatural, or the equivalent statement that everything is supernatural or natural, according as we are pleased to rogard it. But what is of more importance than any such distinction is the fact that the development of an experience usually excluded by extreme physicists and psychologists is a true evolution of the nature of man, and has facts corresponding to it as certainly as our sensible experience has its corresponding objects.

It might be difficult to convince some physicists of the reality of these things; but it would not be more difficult for one to whom these spiritual experiences were familiar to do so than it would be for the supposed physicist to convince any one of the reality of sensible objects corresponding to a set of mental modifications, of which the person needing conviction declared he had and could have no consciousness. In any Revelation, I hold that our spiritual nature is brought face to face with spiritual facts, and I am entitled for all practical purposes to maintain their reality as much as the physicist is en

titled to maintain the reality of the facts of which he is conscious. The objection usually taken against what, for the sake of distinction, we must call the supernatural or spiritual, is an objection taken too often in toto and on the very threshold of the subject. But this is not a fair way of dealing with any question. It forecloses all inquiry, and is quite unscientific. What does science say to its votary above all things? Is its language not, how ignorant we are, how limited our knowledge, walk humbly therefore amid the great unknown? Yet here in thick darkness, at least with purblind eyes, dazzled, too, by the blaze from one quarter of their heaven, the objectors we speak of cry out at once on the bare mention of the spiritual: "This cannot be, we cannot see it, and therefore we shall round our knowledge to one sphere. We shall stand upon our little island here, with the untraversed deep around us, and call this our world. Beyond is nothing to us. We shall not even sally out to it. We shall not chase the horizon that streams with light and glory coming from otherwhere than our small world, to see if perchance we can touch it, or learn if it will fly, and flying allure us with its light into regions of illimitable expanse, realms of glory, which would dispel some of our darkness, correct some of our conceptions even of this world, and amend perhaps our notions of the limits of the knowable. We shall not do this. We shall sail about our creeks, whose every shallow we know, whose perturbations we can descry and signal with our storm drums. We shall not venture on any voyage of discovery, even with the most skilled spiritual pilot of the past, lest we lose ourselves in the shoreless sea of the unknown." This is no exaggerated representation of the attitude of modern science to what is called the spiritual. It is in many cases as blind to it as the ancient mind was to the modern conception of physical law. Those who hold this position in regard to spiritual truth seem to forget, that as experience in these formerly comparatively unknown and therefore supposed arbitrary fields of action enabled men to reduce natural facts to law and order, so experience in the supernatural or spiritual fields which Revelation makes known to the human spirit may also exhibit, if not the same kind of order in their phenomena, at all events the reality of these phenomena. The scientific reform, like all reformations, has been violent. In its reaction from the supernatural, or rather the superstitious, it has left half the truth behind. Obedient only to its primary impulse, it imagines everything solved when it traces succession in sensible experience, and rarely seems prompted to an explanation of anything

farther. Revelation, on the contrary, has little to do with the work of science, and seeks rather what lies underneath the antecedents and consequents of sensible experience. At this point we are met by the supreme difficulty of passing in thought from the seen to the unseen, -the possibility or impossibility of such a passage; we are brought in short to the battle ground of all Revelation, viz., the mode in which spiritual truth becomes known to man, and the facts which form the body of this spiritual Revelation.

CHAPTER II.

KOSMICAL REVELATION.

"The past had always something true.

In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself."

THE difficulty attending any investigation of the question regarding the mode in which spiritual truth is (what is termed) revealed to man cannot be exaggerated. It has been maintained, on the one hand, that there has been spiritual truth among men apart from what many are in the habit of regarding as a special revelation of it; and, on the other, it is asserted that all such spiritual knowledge is derived by tradition from some original special revelation, possibly from the Jewish. There are facts that have been held as countenancing both theories. In the remains of ancient mythologies, as well as in present religions other than the Christian, points of elevation, rising apparently to the height of genuine spiritual insight into spiritual truth, have been reached by seemingly independent means. While again, mingled with these, are to be found striking resemblances to many narrative portions of the Jewish and Christian revelations, forcibly suggesting to many minds some actual connection of the one with the other. But a more painstaking investigation of primitive forms of thought, especially by means of comparative religion and comparative philology, has overthrown much that was formerly considered to give likelihood to both explanations.

There are two general conclusions bearing on the theories now mentioned, and forming, in a manner, a summary of the arguments supplied by the two comparative studies just alluded to: viz., that from comparative religion, which gives us the natural development of savage theology and shows that the deities recognised by the primitive man are not debased forms of the one true God revealed to some primeval ancestor; and that from comparative philology, which lends support to the theory that external nature alone does not reveal the spiritual to man. While both conspire to prove that the representative idea of the spiritual sphere, viz., God, is not revealed through nature; and that the so-called

revelations read by men through this medium were kosmical and not spiritual, and attained the form of spiritual verities by a subjective process, thus separating mythology from historic religion. According to this, there would be, so far as regards the derivative theory, no necessary connection between the Old and New Testament revelations and those supposed revelations found elsewhere. Nor was it ever sufficiently realised that the derivative theory, now almost exploded, is based upon a series of suppositions none of which are certainly true. It must exhibit a real and not an apparent similarity between the original and derivative conceptions; and this, as we have seen, is rendered daily more and more difficult. There is the equally arduous task of explaining how the influence of a particular people could have become prevalent among peoples so numerous and so widely separated. And here the expounders of the theory in question have not merely to contend against the conclusions reached by mythologists and philologists, but have to combat the more exact and reliable conclusions established by ethnological researches. And when all this has been done, it remains to be seen whether the supposition of degeneracy lying at the bottom of this theory is correct or no.

The latter hypothesis has never, so far as I am aware, been anything more than an hypothesis. It is one of those sweeping generalisations, often as not the result of a very general prejudice, which form a starting point for theorists too indolent to acquaint themselves with facts. One labour more awaits those who would enter upon this task. If the theory of degeneracy be correct to fact, it must be possible to state by what laws, supported by what data, the various religions have assumed such divergences from their original and typical form. In the religions or modifications of religious belief connected with Christianity, such as Gnosticism and Islamism, for example, these positions have been established, and the relation between the pure and hybrid systems demonstrated. In the religions of many of the lower tribes we can see where Christianity has affected and coloured the basal elements of indigenous belief; where, for instance, as has frequently been the case, a moral and sometimes truly spiritual conception has been superinduced upon one merely kosmical. This has happened very frequently through the intercourse of Christians with barbarous communities. The skeleton of some particular pagan myth, while remaining the same, has completely changed its meaning and complexion by contact with Christian conceptions. The local myths have been, in