| LECTURE IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE VI. RELIGION IN THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD |
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IF the arguments in favour of belief in the personality of God are as numerous and as weighty as we have seen them to be, the question naturally arises, How can speculative agnosticism seem so plausible, and practical agnosticism be so common as it is? Self-communication is of the essence of personality. If, therefore, God be personal, why is He not universally known, why has He not more conspicuously revealed Himself, as such? To answer this question we must examine both past religious history and present religious experience. But we must begin with the present (πρότερον ήμϊν); for otherwise we have no clue to the phenomena of the past, no thread upon which to string its facts; and the attempt to interpret religious history, without previous insight into religious experience, is a fruitful source of error. [ p. 114 ] What, then, do we mean by the knowledge of a Personal God? What do we expect it to be like? How do religious men describe it ?
To begin with, all knowledge is a process, or the result of a process, conscious or implicit. The simplest knowledge is founded upon sensitive perception, and the ordinary man imagines that sensitive perception is involuntary; he cannot help hearing or seeing or feeling a thing if it is there. But a very little psychology will undeceive him. Not only do we read mental categories or forms into the reports of sensation, before they can become ‘things’ at all, but sensation itself involves attention, which is an act of will, and will is always determined by more or less desire; so that even in sensitive perception there is an active exercise of all the three functions of our personality—thought, emotion, and will. The process, indeed, in common cases, has become so automatic as to appear involuntary; but if we watch children beginning to take notice of things, or if we set ourselves to observe any new class of phenomena, for a scientific or artistic purpose, we at once discover the activity, and the threefold nature of the activity required. The sensible world is there; but our whole personality must co-operate in the knowing of it.
The same thing happens on a larger scale in the case of scientific knowledge. The unscientific [ p. 115 ] man and the sciolist are apt to think that it is purely intellectual, and comes naturally to a certain class of mind. But if we look at the world’s real thinkers, and the lives that they have led, we see at once, that emotional and moral qualities, of no mean order, are involved in the successful pursuit of even the simplest science ; while the two men who are most associated, in the English mind, with the development of scientific method—F. Bacon and J. S. Mill—are equally emphatic in tracing intellectual fallacies to ethical causes, in other words, to the emotions and the will. If we take a physical science, for example, we see at once what a call it makes both on the character and conduct of the student who would succeed in its pursuit. There must be a degree of detachment, which may fairly be called ascetic, from intellectual as well as social distractions; freedom from the mental indolence that allows men to acquiesce in premature conclusions, as well as from all prejudice, whether of habit or inclination; infinite patience; unflagging perseverance; and the enthusiasm which alone makes patience and perseverance possible… Here again, then, though the subject-matter exists outside the man, an active co-operation of all his faculties is needful for its knowledge.
Again, if we turn from abstract to human interests, from natural to social science, the same law is even more conspicuous. For the political or [ p. 116 ] social philosopher must be at least as patient, as persevering, as independent, as enthusiastic as the biologist or chemist. But social science is essentially practical. Practical utility is the object for which it is acquired, as well as its only experimental. test. Its possessor, therefore, must naturally carry it into practice, and this will involve sympathy and courage; for he is not confronted, like the physical experimentalist, by inanimate matter, but by human beings with hearts and passions that react upon hisown. If he quails before their antagonism, or is misled by respect of persons, and stands aside, as Plato sadly says, ‘unhelpful from the storm behind the wall,’ his theories will remain untested, unverified, unreal, the dreams of a doctrinaire. But if he determines to realize his knowledge, whether as a statesman or reformer or philanthropist, he must leave the study for the market-place, and face the fate of patriots— misunderstanding, misrepresentation, disappointment, probable danger, possible death. Thus the fact, that the subject-matter of the social sciences is personal, intensifies their reaction upon the entire personality of their student.
Now we go through a similar process in acquiring the real knowledge of a person. This may not be at first sight obvious, because men so seldom attempt to know the inner nature of the people who surround them. They are content to know [ p. 117 ] them in what may be called an abstract way—in one or more of their various aspects, their business capacities, or social habits, or scientific attainments, or political opinions, or poetical ideas. And it is only once and again under pressure of reverence or love that we crave to pass through these partial manifestations to the character behind them. And then, in proportion to the depth and greatness of the character in question, is the difficulty of really coming to know it. We may easily idolize, or underestimate a man, but to know him as he is— his true motives, the secret springs of his conduct, the measure of his abilities, the explanation of his inconsistencies, the nature of his esoteric feelings, the dominant principle of his inner life—this is often a work of years, and one in which our own character, and conduct, play quite as important a part as our understanding: for not only must the necessary insight be the result of our own acquired capacities—which will have to be great, in proportion to the greatness of the personality with which we have to deal—but there must further exist the kind and degree of affinity between us, which can alone make self-revelation on his part possible. Plato, for instance, the spiritual philosopher, saw more profoundly into Socrates, than could Xenophon, his companion in arms. Shakespeare and de Balzac, in their different spheres, were unrivalled students of humanity: yet the latter could not see in it pure [ p. 118 ] womanhood; the former has never painted a saint; so essentially is even the intuition of genius qualified by character.
We find then, upon analysis, that an element of will, and emotion, is obscurely present in even the simplest beginnings of knowledge. As we pass from ordinary to scientific thinking, the action of this moral factor is intensified ; while it becomes more prominent still in those branches of study whose object is humanity, and therefore whose proper perfection involves their practice; and, finally, in the process of acquiring the knowledge of a person, assumes an entirely preponderant importance.
Now, if we believe in a Personal God, we must believe that our knowledge of Him will be analogous in method to our knowledge of human personality. The various aspects of nature, with which the different sciences deal, must indeed be conceived of as thoughts of the divine mind, divine ideas, and to that extent manifestations of the divine character; but taken by themselves they will no more adequately reveal the personality of their Author than do the external habits, the isolated acts, the occasional speeches of a man. They may arrest our attention by their pregnant suggestiveness, and lead us to look beyond them, but by themselves they convey no knowledge of what is beyond. All that the mathematician [ p. 119 ] knows is that the universe is mathematically arranged ; while the biologist sees, further, in it an immanent teleology, and the artist forms of beauty. But, however much these things may suggest a personality behind them, they do not, and it is obvious, by the nature of the case, that they cannot, afford any knowledge upon the subject. As branches of knowledge, in the strict sense of the term, they begin and end with themselves; and the man who claimed to have swept the heavens with his telescope, and seen no God, was doubtless astronomically accurate. When, indeed, we pass from the natural to the moral sciences, we come near to the evidence for a Personal God ; but it is only a kind of circumstantial evidence. Our inner recognition of a moral law, and our external observation of its inexorable justice, its severe beneficence, its ultimate triumph, are, as we have already seen, among the strongest arguments of natural religion. But still they are only arguments ; they point toa Person, but they are not that Person. Law is universal in its action; it does not individualize; it has no equity, no mercy; it does not behave like a person. And accordingly the history of speculation exhibits many schools of thought which, while fully recognizing the moral law both in their theory and their practice, have yet never regarded it otherwise than as an impersonal power making for righteousness. Moral philosophy, therefore, and even moral conduct, [ p. 120 ] however near to Him they may lead us, will not of themselves give us the knowledge of a Personal God. There is still something abstract and general about them; whereas the knowledge of a person is essentially individual and concrete.
Clearly, then, if we would know God as personal, we must specialize our study with that view: we must begin with a desire to know Himself, as distinct from His manifestations in nature, or His works in the world. And it is obvious that, in proportion to the awfulness of His personality, this desire must be both intense and sincere. We have already seen the impossibility of trifling with a natural, or moral science, or a human friendship, and the seriousness with which they must be approached ; and it will hardly be denied, that to trifle with the study of the Infinite Source of all these things, must be yet more impossible still. This desire, therefore, must be sincere, in the sense that it has no critical or experimental aim, such as the justification of a theory or the refutation of an opponent; and it must be intense enough to counterbalance the multitude of desires which conflict with it, and enable its possessor, in his measure, to make the words of the Psalmist his own: ‘There is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee.’
Further, moral affinity is an essential of personal intimacy. A man cannot understand a character [ p. 121 ] with which his own has no accord. And affinity with a Holy Being implies a progressive and lifelong effort of the will. The moral virtues which we have seen to be necessary for success in science are departmental, and do not cover the whole range of conduct : some are needed, and others not. But to know a Person, who is perfectly holy, we must focus our entire moral character upon Him, for such holiness partakes of the unity of the Person in whom it dwells, and, however various its manifestations, is yet absolutely one. Now such an effort of the will is not easy either of attainment or of maintenance; and still it is not all. We have a past, and an inheritance of sin and infirmity upon us, which the secular moralist counsels us to obliterate, by the simple process of amendment. But amendment is not enough, or rather it is not a simple process, if we view sin as not only the breach of a law, but as also disobedience to a Person whom we now desire to know. ‘Against Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight’ has been the cry of religion the whole world over; and, so far from its bitterness being diminished as religious views grow more refined, it is more acutely terrible to realize that we have wronged our Father, or our Lover, than our Master, or our Judge. Penitence of heart, therefore, or contrition would seem a necessary element in the purification of those who would know God. And as this is [ p. 122 ] a point on which religion is often vehemently attacked, in the name and supposed interests of the higher morality, we may recur for its justification to human analogy. Who that has ever wronged a parent, a benefactor, a lover, or a friend, does not know, as a matter of experience, not only the naturalness of emotional as distinct from ‘ethical repentance’—of sorrow, that is to say, as distinct from mere amendment—but also its necessity, before mutual understanding can be restored, and the increase of that necessity, in proportion to the degree of the love wounded, and the wrong done? This is not a matter of external propriety, but a psychological law which there is no evading: without emotional repentance we must part, or remain on a lower level of intercourse, but we cannot grow in intimacy, and the insight which intimacy brings. And the question with which we are now dealing, it must be remembered, is precisely this—not moral character by itself, but moral character considered as a qualification for the personal knowledge of a Personal God. Human analogy, therefore, is in our favour when we maintain that this character must be penitent as well as progressive, sorrowful of heart as well as resolute of will.
Finally, it is obvious that these moral and emotional conditions will not only accompany but influence the proper action of the intellect ; inducing [ p. 123 ] earnestness, energy, patience with adverse appearances, susceptibility to slight impressions, quickness to catch hints, appreciativeness, moderation, humility, delicacy, fineness. The pain and sorrow of life, for instance, which, abstractedly considered, are a perplexity, gradually cease to be so, to the man who is sincere enough to recognize their punitive and purifying effects in his own history. The uniform laws, which from without look so mechanical, are surprisingly adapted to his individual condition when honestly viewed from within. The obscurity of revelation, or the uncertainty of conscience, are no greater than he feels his due, after trifling with them so often in the past. In this way intellectual difficulties, one after another, fade away, or at least sink into subordinate importance, before a mind that has been duly qualified by moral discipline for their investigation; while, on the other hand, evidences and arguments, which in formal statement are only probable, assume, for the individual, a colour and complexion which ultimately raise them almost to the certainty of an intuition. And this clarification, and control of the intellectual by the moral faculties, is in complete harmony with the analogy which we have been following throughout. For the simplestminded friend or servant knows far more of a man’s true character, than a stranger or an enemy however intellectually able.
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So far we have been considering the knowledge of God from its purely human side ; but the cogency of our conclusion is still further emphasized when we turn to the other aspect of the question, and ask under what conditions His revelation of Himself as personal would, on the same analogy, be naturally made. The same limitations, which qualify our power of knowing a person, qualify also the possibility of his making himself known to us. We have already seen how this is the case in our human relations, and we should expect it to be still more true of a divine revelation. For a Person who is holy cannot reveal Himself as such to the unholy, since they do not know holiness when they see it; and it appears to them unintelligible, terrible, even hateful; anything, in short, but what it really is. A Person who is loving, in the true sense of the word, cannot reveal Himself as such to those who have no notion that — love must involve sacrifice, and has in it, therefore, an awful element of sternness; for to them love would not appear love, but its opposite. An Infinite Person cannot reveal Himself as such to one who, unconscious of his own limitations, persists in measuring all things by the standard of a finite capacity, and denying the existence of what he cannot comprehend. And again, even where there is both desire and aptitude for the revelation, a Person can only reveal Himself [ p. 125 ] partially and gradually, in proportion as these qualifications progressively increase; and we must remember what searchings of heart, and agony of will, that increase, as we have seen, must of necessity imply. And if it be objected to all this, that we cannot imagine, a priori, what the conditions of a divine communication are likely to be, it is sufficient answer that belief in a Personal God means nothing else, than belief in One who acts towards us as persons act, and therefore to whose action human analogies may be applied.
Briefly to resume, then: if God is personal, analogy would lead us to suppose that He must be known as a person is known—that is, first, by a special study distinct from any other, and secondly, by an active exercise of our whole personality, in which the will, the faculty through which alone our personality acts as a whole, must “of necessity predominate; while in proportion to His transcendent greatness, will be the seriousness of the call, which the knowledge of Him makes upon our energies.
Now, it will hardly be denied that in much modern discussion of religious belief these momentous requirements are overlooked; with the result that negative opinions are prematurely adopted, as the result not of profound but of undisciplined investigation. It is continually taken for granted that scientific or critical attainments, [ p. 126 ] or even their intelligent appreciation at secondhand, qualify a man for discussing the personality of God, as if it were a corollary, positive or negative, from one or more of the special sciences, and not, so to say,a science sui generis, with prerequisites and methods of its own. And it naturally follows that the doctrine in question is viewed as purely intellectual, and the ascription of its disbelief to moral causes resented as an impertinence. Nor can the blame of this mistake be said to lie wholly on one side. Controversy may sometimes become too courteous, and, in its righteous reaction against bygone intolerance, forget that toleration has its weak side also. And the fear of seeming to impute motives to individual opponents, or the anxiety to do full justice to an adverse point of view, often leads to a degree of apologetic understatement, which conceals essential differences beneath a surface of agreement, and is in fact, therefore, though not in intention, insincere. The principle that character and conduct are the keys to creed, and that we are, therefore, more responsible for our intellectual behaviour than is often supposed, is precisely one of those points which, amid the civilities of polite debate, is apt to be insufficiently maintained. All analogy, however, is, as we have seen, unmistakably in its favour, and a very moderate amount of introspection should suffice to convince us of its truth.
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Of course the blinding influence of such things as indolence, or sensuality, or vanity, or pride, or avarice, or deliberate selfishness in any form, is too plainly obvious to be denied. But what is denied, as we have already seen, is that a measure of this blinding influence may continue, long after its causes have been practically overcome; and consequently that a penitential process, more profound even than moral amendment, is in all such cases necessary for the restoration of the spiritual vision. And yet this is not only the universal teaching of the Christian Church in every age, but of many a pre-Christian and extra-Christian thinker; and it cannot fail to be justified by sincere self-examination. It is no burden complacently imposed upon the human spirit by men who had not felt its weight. It has been taught, because it has been experienced, and its teachers have only required of others the same discipline, which they themselves have with much suffering gone through. ‘He must become godlike,’ says Plotinus, ‘who desires to see God.’
Again, there are less obviously immoral tendencies, —such as intellectual ambition, the need of controversial consistency, the subtle desire to increase or retain an influence, the speculative irreverence of youth, the desponding tone of age—which easily escape our notice, yet, unless detected and subdued, will distort and deflect the action of our judgement [ p. 128 ] from its true course in examining the things of the spirit.
And again, there are still slighter defects, which often pass as intellectual, and yet which on reflection can be seen to be of moral origin, and, like the infinitesimal aberration of an astronomical instrument, vitiate our entire observation. For example, the above-mentioned assumption, that the knowledge of God is primarily intellectual, involves, on the face of it, an undervaluing of His attribute of holiness. The assertion that our faculties cannot apprehend what they cannot comprehend, cannot feel what they do not understand, implies a more complete self-knowledge than we in fact possess. The kindred denial, that spiritual experience may be as real as physical experience, casts a slur upon the mental capacity of many of the greatest of our race, from which true humility would shrink. The transference of the method of one science to the pursuit of another, the neglect to distinguish clearly between hypothesis and fact, the undue bias of the imagination by special kinds of study, the premature deduction of negative conclusions—the dangers, in fact, of specialism in an age when knowledge is increasingly specialized—are more often admitted in word than really in practice avoided. And though these and such-like imperfections may seem to many to be trivial, when regarded from a moral point of view, they are not so in the particular [ p. 129 ] context and connexion with which we are now concerned ; and still less so in the case of teachers (and every writer is a teacher) who would abolish an august tradition, coeval with recorded history, and involving the highest hopes and aspirations of mankind.
Of course it is not to be contended that these moral dispositions are the exclusive cause of intellectual error in religion. As there are countless professed believers, whose orthodoxy has never touched their hearts, and who may therefore be called spiritually dead, so there are unbelievers whose conduct and emotions are in continual rebellion against the limitations of their creed, and who, for all their unbelief, therefore, are spiritually alive. But, however numerous these cases, they are the exception and not the rule, and do not alter our conviction that average agnosticism is in one or other of the many ways above described of moral origin; while the impossibility, as well as the impropriety, of judging individual opponents, makes it all the more necessary to emphasize the importance of the principle in general. There is no arrogance in so doing: the arrogance, on the contrary, lies with those who expect to attain a specific kind of knowledge without undergoing its appropriate discipline[1]. At the same time, so serious a statement, with the grave charge that [ p. 130 ] it implies, would never have been put forward, as it » has been by Christians in every age, if it rested only upon probable reasoning. The analogy which we have been pursuing a priori has been abundantly verified in personal experience, and indeed in many cases represents the analysis rather than the antecedent of that experience. And this inductive verification, as in logical language it may be called, is an essential part of its argumentative presentation. We must turn, therefore, to the Christian or Theistic consciousness, and view the operation, as seen from within, of the process which we have hitherto been discussing from without.
Its point of departure, then, is the point to which analogy has conducted us, the necessity of holiness, and therefore of purification. True, there are the Galahads and Percevals of life—those for whom ‘the vision splendid’ of all that is lovely and of good report has never lost its fascination or ‘ faded into the light of common day’—as well as those who have realized a measure of the bitterness of Dante’s words:
‘Tanto giu cadde che tutti argomenti
Alla salute sua eran gia corti
Fuor che monstrarli le perdute genti’
But the clear insight of the innocent, in proportion to its purity, sees altitudes of possible attainment, and detects degrees of contaminating evil, which [ p. 131 ] are alike beyond the range of ordinary eyes; and is only, therefore, the more acutely, sensitively conscious of its own share in the universal human need of purification. But this purification, when, in independence of all inferior sanctions, it is viewed as taking place under the immediate eye of God, assumes at once a new extent and a new intensity. For its standard is then perfection and its consequent inadequacy infinite. Attraction to the beauty of holiness, or aversion from the spectacle of sin, love of God, or hatred of self, may be the dominant passion of the soul; but the result in either case is similar—a sense of hopeless, helpless impotence to attain the one, or to avoid the other. This sense of incapacity is specifically religious. It goes beyond any analogy that can be drawn from human intercourse. Nor can it exist in any ethical system, whose standard is relative, or whose sanctions hypothetical. Fora relative standard may be attained with effort, and an hypothetical sanction may be declined at will. But union with God can neither be attained nor yet declined by man; it is felt to be imperative, yet seems to be impossible. And hence issues the universal cry of all true religion— ‘Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. That may be done from the divine side which cannot be done from the human. And from the conviction that this cry is answered, comes the assurance that we are in contact with [ p. 132 ] a Personal God. The paths which may lead men to this conviction are various, the circumstances which surround it various, the modes of its description various—differing in different religions, and different individuals; but the essential fact is the same—that the human cry has been divinely answered.
Here, then, we are in the presence of a new fact, which is usually called ‘supernatural,’ and may most conveniently be called so still, in the sense that it comes from the spiritual region, in contrast with that which in ordinary language we are accustomed to call natural. And a new fact is simply a matter of experience. It may be argued against as impossible, or argued for as probable ; but neither argument can really touch it; it either has or has not been experienced, and with that the question ends. What, then, is the evidence of the reality of religious experience? Common sense, and scientific criticism, and medical pathology may freely prune its excentricities to the limit of their will. But there remains an immense and unexplained. residuum, of the best and noblest of our race, men and women, who in every age and in every rank and station, and endowed with every degree and kind of intellectual capacity, have lived the lives of saints and heroes, or died the death of martyrs, and furthered by their action and passion, and, as they trusted, by their prayers, the material, [ p. 133 ] moral, social, spiritual welfare of mankind, solely in reliance on their personal intercourse with God. Materialism is obliged to explain their experience away, as a reflex action misinterpreted, or other form of hallucination; with the awkward result of having to attribute the finest types of human character, as well as the greatest factor in the progress of the world, to the direct action of mental disease. But materialism already labours under difficulties enough of its own. All, however, who, on the other hand, admit the probability, or even the possibility of a Personal God, must be arrested by the spectacle of ‘this great cloud of witnesses’ claiming to have known Him as a person is known. It is a distinct additional argument, and one more easily ignored than answered. The fact attested is an interior certainty of personal intercourse with God, and as such is quite distinct from any consequence or doctrine in whose favour it may be subsequently used; a purely spiritual fact. The persons who attest it are a minority of religious people, and not, therefore, to be confused with those who merely believe in its possibility, without professing its experience; but though a relative minority, they are strictly ‘a multitude whom no man can number’—competent, capable, sane, of no one type or temperament, as old as authentic history, as numerous as ever in the world to-day ; a far more searchingly sifted and universally extended [ p. 134 ] body of observers than can be quoted in behalf of any single scientific fact. We are fairly entitled, therefore, to claim this accumulated mass of consentient evidence, as a powerful confirmation of all our other arguments.
The process which analogy suggests, then, is the process which the saints have followed, and they assure us that by following it they have reached their goal—the personal knowledge of a Personal God. It is a process which, as we have seen, involves the action of our entire personality, both in its extent and its intensity, its wholeness and its oneness. ‘God,’ says Plato, ‘holds the soul attached to Him by its root’; and it is not till we get down to this root of the soul, the ‘I,’ that is more fundamental than all its faculties or functions, that we feel the need of that communion with Him, which is in reality an evidence that He is already in communion with us. ‘Tetigisti me et exarsi in pacem tuam.’ Hence it is a process whose every moment is instinct with life, and which no amount of abstract language can adequately represent. To be realized in its full force, whether of example or of argument, it must be watched in those who are living it, or studied as recorded in the Psalter, the Epistle to the Romans, the Confessions of Augustine, the German Theology, the Imitation of Christ, and the countless lesser spiritual biographies of holy and [ p. 135 ] humble men of heart, who have lived it and departed in its peace.
Now an important consequence which follows from all this is that religious knowledge, in the sense above described—knowledge of God as distinct from opinion about Him—is of the nature of a personal and private property, peculiar to its possessor, and which others cannot share. This is a fact which in controversy is apt to be ignored ; and its assertion is sometimes resented. Yet, again, universal analogy is in its favour. Scientific truth, too, is the personal possession of the earnest experimentalist, who for the sake of it has ‘ scorned delights and lived laborious days’; and in proportion to the degree of his advance in it he is alone. Even when its discoveries, such as steam or electricity or chloroform, are embodied for popular use in practical appliances, we know the danger of such appliances in ignorant, untutored hands; and its speculative results are equally unmeaning and unsafe, in the mouth of the sciolist who knows nothing of the method or discipline of their attainment. So, again, in the intimacy of friends there are secrets shared, and privileges granted, and sacred thoughts exhibited, of which no stranger is allowed a glimpse. The privacy of religious knowledge, therefore, is only the privacy of all knowledge carried to a further degree. The religious man cannot communicate the inner secret [ p. 136 ] of his life. He may be able to lay before inquirers a reason for the faith that is in him, proofs of the existence of God, and of the reasonableness of revelation, and of its preponderant probability over adverse theories: but he feels the while that these arguments cannot of themselves insure conviction, and have in his own case been supplemented from other and more esoteric sources, too secret, too subtle, too spiritual, too sacred to produce. Influences that have been brought to bear on him, events that have been controlled for him, strangely occurrent voices of prophet, or of psalmist, speaking to him suddenly in crises of his life; prayers answered, efforts assisted, purposes thwarted, providence felt ; warnings of God in disease and dreams, judgements unmistakable of God on other men; punishments, consolations, moments of spiritual insight ; memories of saints; examples of friends —these, and such-like things, as they have gathered round his history, are the ground of his inner certitude that he is living face to face with One who ‘knoweth his downsitting and his uprising and understandeth his thoughts long before’; who ‘is about his path and about his bed, and spicth out all his ways.’ Naturally the subject of such experience as this does not expect others to be convinced by it. It is his experience, and not another’s, and is conclusive to him alone. Now and again a great religious teacher lays bare the [ p. 137 ] secrets of his inmost spirit, less for the conviction of opponents than for the confirmation of kindred souls: but most men, who are at all conscious of them, keep these things and ponder them in their hearts ; with the result that both their force and frequency are underrated by the external critic, and things attributed to exceptional superstition, or hallucination, that in reality are normal episodes in the spiritual life. For the purposes of our analogy we have been obliged to speak of this spiritual life, as if the knowledge of it only supervened at a certain stage upon the use of our natural faculties. But in reality it is only explicitly known at the end, because it is implicitly contained in the beginning. As reason qualifies and conditions our whole animal nature by its presence, so that we are never merely animals, spirituality also permeates and modifies all that we call our natural faculties; and our personality itself is, in this sense, as truly supernatural as the Divine Person in whom alone it finds its home.
| LECTURE IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE VI. RELIGION IN THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD |