ye

be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing." If we are lowly reverent, aspiring and devoted, this is the real spirit of Christ; and in it we shall experience the truth of the prophetic testimony, "to this man will I look, even to him that is poor, and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word," "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him." Surely in words of inspiration like these there is an endless germinative power to fill with spiritual life the widest horizon of knowledge. For what is the secret of the Lord but this, that all life is a communion with the Heavenly Father, all beauty a glimpse of His light, all joy a share in His bliss, all struggle and sorrow but a hint of the ineffable burden that He bears "in bringing many sons unto glory?" He then who has this blessed secret knows why he lives, and why creation enspheres his life, and why the whole world groans and travails in pain together until now. Such an experience when bright and clear is heaven begun on earth; it is a draught from that "river of God's pleasures," which some day we shall follow up to its source behind the veil. And he with whom is this secret of the Lord can look, if with painful longing, yet without despair on all the darkness of the world's mystery of sin. For his own experience tells him that

"completely initiated," which I believe St. Paul to have meant, would seem harsh and pedantic.

His own

God is not far from very every one of us. communion with God he values, not as a personal or sectarian peculiarity, but as a token of the divine kinship of all mankind. Indeed herein often lies the distinction between genuine religious experience and mere sectarian fanaticism. For the one makes us more human than before, brings us down from our personal isolation unto the deeper region of life, which, though beneath the surface of consciousness in many, is nevertheless we feel a generic attribute of man. shuts us up in self or sect, and makes us feel as the detestable Calvinistic sentiment has it

66 a garden walled around,

Chosen and made peculiar ground."

The other

Nor is this all the distinction. Sectarian fanaticism will generally be found to eye the future with gloomy fear, sweetened only by the fierce joy of personal salvation as a brand snatched from a burning world. But he who feels most profoundly God's essential nearness to himself, will derive from that a secure and sometimes triumphant confidence that one day God will be all in all. The present life we have in God should rid us from any slavish dependence on the letter of Scripture. Therefore we shall not try to guess the future of earth and heaven from peddling criticism of words, which, however divine in spiritual suggestion, were specially adapted to times when the only available forms of speech and thought were inseparable from utter misconceptions of the universe. The dawning

of God's presence in ourselves, interpreted by the general continuity of progress, is the most certain prophecy we can have of the final and universal prevalence of life in Him. The feeling that the final cause of our own creation is our joy in God and his joy in us assures us that the mystery of God can never be finished until the kingdoms of heaven and earth and hell are delivered up to the Father, that He may be all in all.

LECTURE II.

THE GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS IN HUMANITY.

"Nevertheless I am continually with thee.”—Ps. lxiii. 23.

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If haply they might feel after Him, and find Him though He be not far from every one of us."-Acts xvii. 27.

THE phrase, 'God-consciousness,' awkwardly imitated from the German, sounds no doubt harshly to English ears, and it is as well to confess at once that I am about to give to it a wider sense than perhaps is usual. But whether I could have used any better words to express my meaning I must leave you to judge after that meaning is unfolded. I will only by way of anticipation say that it at least expresses a present actual fact of human life. And this much at least we owe to the "Positive Philosophy," that we are driven more than ever to seek the roots of religious conviction as well as of scientific knowledge in the undeniable realities of experience. Besides, I have said 'in humanity' rather than 'in man,' because I do not mean an occasional or even a frequent phenomenon of

experience, but a constituent element in human nature, a faculty so irrepressible and universal, that if it be blocked in one direction it almost invariably re-appears in another; an instinct so deep that even where it does not appear in the articulate consciousness of the individual, it broods in an impersonal form round the bases of the life of his race. For every single member of a tribe or nation may be wholly without any perception of personal communion with a living eternal Spirit, while yet in the ideal aspirations, or, if you will, in the superstitious habits which move or control the community there may be significant indications of that element in humanity which is the subject of our thoughts.

If I read aright the signs of the times, the interpretation to be given to this element in human nature is likely to become more and more the one religious question; and will perhaps be felt to carry within itself the decision of all others worth contending about. And farther one may venture to say that if only earnest appreciative attention can be secured to the ́thing itself, the mere name that shall be given to it is at most a secondary question, and by no means so vital as some appear to think. For men otherwise lost in doubt, may still be candid, still be faithful to what they feel to be the noblest instincts of their nature. And if so, I maintain they may be practically obeying the God-consciousness within them, even though through intellectual error they may call it by another name. Let a man realize with awe the vastness of creation