more confident than ever that conscious communion with God is open to all seeking souls, and must needs be a nobler state and a keener joy than any blind participation in his life. For he who can trace the mystic light that conscience loves, who can follow it up the beams of heaven and find its source in the brightness of God's glory is more consistent, and is likely to be more earnest, in cherishing that light with reverence, than any man who finds in it only an electric condition of the brain. All I contend is that the one opinion or the other cannot possibly alter the essential nature of the moral life, and therefore cannot change its character as a communion with God.

The use of this word communion to express anything short of personal conscious and recognized relationship to God will no doubt appear incongruous to some. Yet, as it describes the sharing in some common elements of life, if all good thoughts and holy desires do really proceed from God's Spirit, such a use of the word cannot be inaccurate or illegitimate; and it is most convenient to our purpose. Indeed it is very common for good and pious advisers of the faint-hearted to comfort them in their religious depression by assuring them that they are partakers of the divine nature to a much greater extent than they are aware. I then would merely push this possible dissidence between consciousness and reality to the extreme limit which facts require, and would maintain that God's creatures may be partakers of the divine nature without knowing it at all.

In this view it is evident that there is opened up to us an endless scale of degrees and disguises of which the attainment of creation's final cause is susceptible. Indeed the possibility of many degrees in attainment is suggested by St. Paul, when he hints that men may have to feel after God before they find Him. And surely they often feel after Him, when they know not at all what it is they want. Nay, in the sense which we have seen to be inherent in the word, there is some communion with God even in the humblest parts of creation. For there is a certain communion possible between the artist and his work, though indefinitely lower than that between a father and his children. A part of the worker himself has gone into his work; it appeals to him as it cannot do to any one else. A thing begotten, he knows not how, in the depths of his life beneath consciousness has risen more and more clearly into the surface light. And in his eager desire to give it the most articulate expression he has put it altogether outside him in the dry light of the outer world. But though it is outside him he feels as though his own life were in it; and in its reflection of his thought without the effort of conception, or at least in the communication and diffusion of the treasures hid in self, he finds perhaps some faint analogy to creative bliss. For so the Supreme Worker, we feel, must have a certain communion with landscape beauties, and organic wonders, with mountain heights and nestling violets, with leviathan in his strength, and with the lark

in his ecstacy. I doubt not these are precious to the soul just because they are thoughts of God; they are great or beautiful because they are partakers of the divine nature. If we may dare to say it, they reflect God upon Himself; in them the treasures of his nature are diffused abroad; and He, the changeless, dwells in everlasting communion with the always changing universe, whose revolutions are phases of his glory. Thus no blossom drops, no withered leaf flitters down, but it enshrines its little part in the final cause of creation. For not at the birth of the world only, but now and for evermore the Divine Artist looks on all that his hands have made, "and behold it is very good."

But the Supreme Worker is a Father too; and in this relationship we believe Him to seek a higher communion, which bears a transcendental analogy to the most perfect communion of fathers and children on earth. The first approach to this higher communion was made, when the first moral sentiment was felt; and this relationship between God and Man will be consummated when all things are gathered into one in Christ, that is in the divine humanity. By a purely moral sentiment I mean the preference for an action because it is right, because it is kind or good, even at the expense of self, or at any rate apart from any consideration of comfort or convenience or advantage. If for example we may suppose that after ages of creative progress one of those dim flint-splitting creatures, who haunt the shadows on the borders of a past eternity, took pity on a wounded

comrade left on an abandoned field and said 'I will carry him food and water though I die, for that is brave and right,' then I maintain that in him this higher divine communion was begun, though he could not know it as we do now. Only little by little would such moral sentiments acquire clear distinctness from the carnal life, and in the continuity of progress we can easily believe that the first steps might be imperceptible; but could they be traced, that would be the beginning of this higher communion with God, and an approximation towards the purest and intensest form of creation's final cause. But when men looked up to the glory of the dawn, and dreamed that day was poured from a source of light, supreme, unapproachable, which no man had seen or could see; when they began to associate that Shining One with the impartial sanction of the goodness they already loved, and to see in the lightning and the sun-stroke images of his vengeance against evil then the gates of a nearer access to the divine majesty were opened, and the possibility of a conscious communion with the Most High touched their hearts with a blessed awe.

I make no pretence at presenting anything but a possible outline of the earliest spiritual progress, an outline to which I shall ask attention again from another point of view.* The whole subject is yet far too obscure to allow any confident assertion of precise steps and their

*See Lecture II.

connection. But when I think how our faith in God and even the patent facts of spiritual consciousness are, by the perverse obstinacy of a zeal not according to knowledge, made to stand or fall with certain theories of human history which every year makes more untenable, I should be false to every highest duty of my vocation did I not attempt to show that the reality of our personal divine relationship is conceivably consistent with any scheme of the past that science can possibly propound. When I am summoned to stand and deliver on the one hand candour and common sense or on the faith in God, it is high time to show cause why I decline to do either.

other my

It will easily be conceived that every movement in this high progress might be accompanied by eddying fancies or even back currents, by fetishism, or magic, or the wild theogonies of old; by devil-worship which passed backward through the beast to the demon; or by the material pantheism, which often, as in the case of Lucretius, had an inspiration little suspected by itself. But on the whole the history of human progress is the history of the growing purity and lustre with which this final cause of creation, creature life in God, has beamed forth on human souls. Prophets who heard in stillness and spoke in thunder, lawgivers who strove to bring down the marshalled order of the heavens on earth, poets who caught the subtle spirit of earthly beauty and breathed it from their lyres, psalmists who interpreted the meaning looks of sky and field and flood and found their whole